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THE TWO COVENANTS 






By Rev* Andrew Murray 

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Fleming H # Reveli Company 

New York : 158 Fifth Ave. Chicago : 63 Washington St. 
Toronto : 154 Yonge St. 



The Two Covenants 



AND 



The Second Blessing 



BY 

Rev. Andrew Murray 

AUTHOR OF 

14 The Ministry of Intercession,' ■ "With Christ," 
u Waiting- on God," etc., etc. 




New York Chicago Toronto 

Fleming H. Revell Company 

Publishers of Evangelical Literature 



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24085 



Copyright 1 898-1899 
by 
Fleming H. Reveix Company 



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Contents 

PAGE 

Introduction , 7 

I 
A Covenant God 11 

II 

The Two Covenants : Their Relation 20 

III 
The First Covenant 28 

IV 
The New Covenant 36 

V 
The Two Covenants — In Christian Experience ... 45 

VI 
The Everlasting Covenant 54 

VII 
The New Covenant : A Ministration of the Spirit . 63 

VIII 
The Two Covenants: The Transition 71 

IX 
The Blood of the Covenant 80 

X 
Jesus, the Mediator of the New Covenant .... 88 

XI 
Jesus, the Surety of the Better Covenant .... 97 

XII 

The Book of the Covenant 106 

XIII 
New Covenant Obedience 114 

5 



Contents 

PAGE 

XIV 
The New Covenant: A Covenant of Grace. . . .124 

XV 
The Covenant of an Everlasting Priesthood . . . .132 

XVI 

The Ministry of the New Covenant 140 

XVII 

His Holy Covenant 149 

XVIII 
Entering the Covenant: With All the Heart . . . 158 



Note A — The Second Blessing. . 168 

Note B — The Law Written in the Heart 174 

Note C — George Muller and His Second Conversion, 181 

NoteD — Canon Battersby 189 

Note E — Nothing of Myself ....••• 193 

Note F — The Whole Heart 199 



Introduction 

It is often said that the great aim of the 
preacher ought to be to translate Scripture truth 
from its Jewish form into the language and the 
thought of the nineteenth century, and so to 
make it intelligible and acceptable to our ordi- 
nary Christians. It is to be feared that the ex- 
periment will do more harm than good. In the 
course of the translation the force of the original 
is lost. The scholar who trusts to translations 
will never become a master of the language he 
wants to learn. A race of Christians will be 
raised up, to whom the language of God's Word, 
and with that the God who spoke it, will be 
strange. In the Scripture words not a little of 
Scripture truth will be lost. For the true Chris- 
tian life nothing is so healthful and invigorating 
as to have each man come and study for him- 
self the very words in which the Holy Ghost has 
spoken. 

One of the words of Scripture, which is almost 
going out of fashion, is the word Covenant. 
There was a time when it was the keynote of 
the theology and the Christian life of strong and 



Introduction 

holy men. We know how deep in Scotland it 
entered into the national life and thought. It 
made mighty men, to whom God, and His 
promise and power were wonderfully real. It 
will be found still to bring strength and purpose 
to those who will take the trouble to bring all 
their life under control of the inspiring assurance 
that they are living in covenant with a God who 
has sworn faithfully to fulfill in them every 
promise He has given. 

This book is a humble attempt to show what 
exactly the blessings are that God has covenanted 
to bestow on us; what the assurance is the Cove- 
nant gives that they must, and can, and will be 
fulfilled; what the hold on God Himself is which 
it thus gives us; and what the conditions are for 
the full and continual experience of its blessings. 
I feel confident that if I can lead any to listen to 
what God has to say to them of His Covenant, 
and to deal with Him as a Covenant God, it will 
bring them strength and joy. 

Not long ago I received from one of my corre- 
spondents a letter with the following passage in 
it: — "I think you will excuse and understand me 
when I say there is one further note of power I 
would like so much to have introduced into your 

next book on Intercession. God Himself has, I 

8 



Introduction 

know, been giving me some direct teaching this 
winter upon the place the New Covenant is to 
have in intercessory prayer. . . . I know you 
believe in the Covenant, and the Covenant rights 
we have on account of it. Have you followed 
out your views of the Covenant as they bear 
upon this subject of intercession ? Am I wrong 
in coming to the conclusion that we may come 
boldly into God's presence, and not only ask, 
but claim a Covenant right through Christ Jesus 
to all the spiritual searching, and cleansing, and 
knowledge, and power promised in the three 
great Covenant promises ? If you would take 
the Covenant and speak of it as God could enable 
you to speak, I think that would be the quickest 
way the Lord could take to make His Church 
wake up to the power He has put into our hands 
in giving us a Covenant. I would be so glad if 
you would tell God's people that they have a 
Covenant" Though this letter was not the oc- 
casion of the writing of the book, and our Cove- 
nant rights have been considered in a far wider 
aspect than their relation to prayer, I am per- 
suaded that nothing will help us more in our 
work of intercession, than the entrance for our- 
selves personally into what it means that we 
have a Covenant God. 

9 



Introduction 

My one great desire has been to ask Christians 
whether they are really seeking to find out what 
exactly God wants them to be, and is willing to 
make them. It is only as they want, "that the 
mind of the Lord may be showed them," that 
their faith can ever truly see, or accept, or enjoy 
what God calls " His salvation." As long as we 
expect God to do for us what we ask or think, 
we limit Him. When we believe that as high as 
the heavens are above the earth, His thoughts 
are above our thoughts, and wait on Him as God 
to do unto us according to His word, as He 
means, we shall be prepared to live the truly 
supernatural, heavenly life the Holy Spirit can 
work in us — the true Christ life. 

May God lead every reader into the secret of 
His presence, and "show him His Covenant." 

ANDREW MURRAY. 

Wellington, South Africa, 
1st November, 1898. 



10 



THE TWO COVENANTS 



A COVENANT GOD 

" Know therefore that the Lord thy God, He is 
God, the faithful God, which heepeth covenant 
and mercy with them that love Him and keep His 
commandments." — Deut. vii. 9. 

Men often make covenants. They know the 
advantages to be derived from them. As an end 
of enmity or uncertainty, as a statement of serv- 
ices and benefits to be rendered, as a security for 
their certain performance, as a bond of amity and 
good-will, as a ground for perfect confidence and 
friendship, a covenant has often been of unspeak- 
able value. 

In His infinite condescension to our human 

weakness and need, there is no possible way in 

which men pledge their faithfulness, that God 

has not sought to make use of, to give us perfect 

confidence in Him, and the full assurance of all 

that He, in His infinite riches and power as God, 

11 



The Two Covenants 

has promised to do to us. It is with this view 
He has consented to bind Himself by covenant, 
as if He could not be trusted. Blessed is the man 
who truly knows God as his Covenant God ; 
who knows what the Covenant promises him; 
what unwavering confidence of expectation it 
secures, that all its terms will be fulfilled to him ; 
what a claim and hold it gives him on the 
Covenant-keeping God Himself. To many a 
man, who has never thought much of the Cove- 
nant, a true and living faith in it would mean the 
transformation of his whole life. The full 
knowledge of what God wants to do for him; the 
assurance that it will be done by an Almighty 
Power; the being drawn to God Himself 'in per- 
sonal surrender, and dependence, and waiting to 
have it done ; all this would make the Covenant the 
very gate of heaven. May the Holy Spirit give 
us some vision of its glory. 

When God created man in His image and like- 
ness, it was that he might have a life as like His 
own as it was possible for a creature to live. 
This was to be by God Himself living and work- 
ing all in man. For this man was to yield him- 
self in loving dependence to the wonderful glory 
of being the recipient, the bearer, the manifesta- 
tion of a Divine life. The one secret of man's 

12 



A Covenant God 

happiness was to be a trustful surrender of his 
whole being to the willing and the working of 
God. When sin entered, this relation to God 
was destroyed; when man had disobeyed, he 
feared God and fled from Him. He no longer 
knew, or loved, or trusted God. 

Man could not save himself from the power of 
sin. If his redemption was to be effected, God 
must do it all. And if God was to do it in har- 
mony with the law of man's nature, man must be 
brought to desire it, to yield his willing consent, 
and entrust himself to God. All that God wanted 
man to do was, to believe in Him. What a man 
believes, moves and rules his whole being, enters 
into him, and becomes part of his very life. Sal- 
vation could only be by faith : God restoring the 
life man had lost; man in faith yielding himself 
to God's work and will The first great work of 
God with man was to get him to believe. This 
work cost God more care and time and patience 
than we can easily conceive. All the dealings 
with individual men, and with the people of 
Israel, had just this one object, to teach men to 
trust Him. Where He found faith He could do 
anything. Nothing dishonored and grieved Him 
so much as unbelief. Unbelief was the root of 
disobedience and every sin; it made it impossible 

13 



The Two Covenants 

for God to do His work. The one thing God 
sought to waken in men by promise and threat- 
ening, by mercy and judgment, was faith. 

Of the many devices of which God's patient 
and condescending grace made use to stir up and 
strengthen faith, one of the chief was — the 
Covenant. In more than one way God sought 
to effect this by His Covenant. First of all, His 
Covenant was always a revelation of His pur- 
poses, holding out, in definite promise, what God 
was willing to work in those with whom the 
Covenant was made. It was a Divine pattern of 
the work God intended to do in their behalf, that 
they might know what to desire and expect, that 
their faith might nourish itself with the very 
things, though as yet unseen, which God was 
working out. Then, the Covenant was meant to 
be a security and guarantee, as simple and plain 
and humanlike as the Divine glory could make 
it, that the very things which God had promised 
would indeed be brought to pass and wrought 
out in those with whom He had entered into 
covenant. Amid all delay and disappointment 
and apparent failure of the Divine promises, the 
Covenant was to be the anchor of the soul, 
pledging the Divine veracity and faithfulness 

and unchangeableness for the certain perform- 

14 



A Covenant God 

ance of what had been promised. And so the 
Covenant was, above all, to give man a hold 
upon God, as the Covenant-keeping God, to link 
him to God Himself in expectation and hope, 
to bring him to make God Himself alone the 
portion and the strength of his soul. 

Oh that we knew how God longs that we 
should trust Him, and how surely His every 
promise must be fulfilled to those who do so! 
Oh that we knew how it is owing to nothing 
but our unbelief that we cannot enter into the 
possession of God's promises, and that God can- 
not — yes, cannot — do His mighty works in us, 
and for us, and through us! Oh that we knew 
how one of the surest remedies for our unbelief 
— the divinely chosen cure for it — is the Cove- 
nant into which God has entered with us! The 
whole dispensation of the Spirit, the whole econ- 
omy of grace in Christ Jesus, the whole of our 
spiritual life, the whole of the health and growth 
and strength of the Church, has been laid down 
and provided for, and secured in the New Cove- 
nant. No wonder that, where that Covenant, 
with its wonderful promises, is so little thought 
of, its plea for an abounding and unhesitating 
confidence in God so little understood, its claim 

upon the faithfulness of the Omnipotent God so 

15 



The Two Covenants 

little tested; no wonder that Christian life should 
miss the joy and the strength, the holiness and 
the heavenliness which God meant and so clearly 
promised that it should have. 

Let us listen to the words in which God's 
Word calls us to know, and worship, and trust 
our Covenant-keeping God — it may be we shall 
find what we have been looking for: the deeper, 
the full experience of all God's grace can do in 
us. In our text Moses says: "Know therefore 
that the Lord thy God, He is God, the faithful 
God, which keepeth covenant with them that 
love Him." Hear what God says in Isaiah: 
"The mountains shall depart, and the hills be 
removed; but My kindness shall not depart from 
thee, neither shall My covenant of peace be re- 
moved, saith the Lord that hath mercy on thee." 
More sure than any mountain is the fulfillment 
of every Covenant promise. Of the New Cove- 
nant, in Jeremiah, God speaks: " 1 will make an 
everlasting covenant with them, that I will not 
turn away from them, to do them good; but I 
will put My fear in their hearts, that they shall 
not depart from Me." The Covenant secures 
alike that God will not turn from us, nor we de- 
part from Him: He undertakes both for Himself 
and us. 

16 



A Covenant God 

Let us ask very earnestly whether the lack in 
our Christian life, and specially in our faith, is 
not owing to the neglect of the Covenant. We 
have not worshipped nor trusted the Covenant- 
keeping God. Our soul has not done what God 
called us to — "to take hold of His Covenant," 
"to remember the Covenant"; is it wonder that 
our faith has failed and come short of the bless- 
ing ? God could not fulfill His promises in us. 
If we will begin to examine into the terms of the 
Covenant, as the title-deeds of our inheritance, 
and the riches we are to possess even here on 
earth; if we will think of the certainty of their 
fulfillment, more sure than the foundations of the 
everlasting mountains; if we will turn to the God 
who has engaged to do all for us, who keepeth 
covenant forever, our life will become different 
from what it has been; it can, and will be, all 
that God would make it. 

The great lack of our religion is — we need 
more of God. We accept salvation as His gift, 
and we do not know that the only object of sal- 
vation, its chief blessing, is to fit us for, and 
bring us back to, that close intercourse with God 
for which we were created, and in which our 
glory in eternity will be found. All that God 

has ever done for His people in making a cove- 

17 



The Two Covenants 

nant was always to bring them to Himself as 
their chief, their only good, to teach them to 
trust in Him, to delight in Him, to be one with 
Him. It cannot be otherwise. If God, indeed, 
be nothing but a very fountain of goodness and 
glory, of beauty and blessedness, the more we 
can have of His presence, the more we conform 
to His will, the more we are engaged in His 
service, the more we have Him ruling and work- 
ing all in us, the more truly happy shall we be. 
And that only is a true and good religious life, 
which brings us every day nearer to this God, 
which makes us give up everything to have 
more of Him. No obedience can be too strict, 
no dependence too absolute, no submission too 
complete, no confidence too implicit, to a soul 
that is learning to count God Himself its chief 
good, its exceeding joy. 

In entering into covenant with us, God's one 
object is to draw us to Himself, to render us 
entirely dependent upon Himself, and so to bring 
us into the right position and disposition in 
which He can fill us with Himself, His love, and 
His blessedness. Let us undertake our study of 
the New Covenant, in which, if we are believers, 
God is at this moment living and walking with 

us, with the honest purpose and surrender, at 

18 



A Covenant God 

any price, }o know what God wishes to be to 
us, to do in us, and to have us be and do to Him. 
The New Covenant may become to us one of the 
windows of heaven through which we see into 
the face, into the very heart, of God. 



19 



II 

THE two covenants: their relation 

"It is written, that Abraham had two sons, 
one by the bondmaid, and one by the free woman. 
Howbeit, the one by the bondmaid is born after 
the flesh; but the son by the free woman is born 
through promise. Which things contain an alle- 
gory: for these women are two covenants." — 
Gal. iv. 22-24. 

There are two covenants, one called the Old, 
the other the New. God speaks of this very 
distinctly in Jeremiah, where He says: "The 
days come, that I will make a new covenant 
with the house of Israel, not after the covenant 
I made with their fathers " (Jer. xxxi.). This is 
quoted in Hebrews, with the addition: " In that 
He saith a new covenant, He hath made the first 
old." Our Lord spoke Himself of the New 
Covenant in His blood. In His dealings with 
His people, in His working out His great re- 
demption, it has pleased God that there should 
be two covenants. 

It has pleased Him, not as an arbitrary appoint- 
ment but for good and wise reasons, which 

20 



The Two Covenants: Their Relation 

made it indispensably necessary that it should be 
so, and no otherwise. The clearer our insight 
into the reasons, and the Divine reasonableness, 
of there thus being two covenants, and into their 
relation to each other, the more full and true can 
be our own personal apprehension of what the 
New Covenant is meant to be to us. They indi- 
cate two stages in God's dealing with man; two 
ways of serving God, a lower or elementary one 
of preparation and promise, a higher or more ad- 
vanced one of fulfillment and possession. As 
that in which the true excellency of the second 
consists is opened up to us, we can spiritually 
enter into what God has prepared for us. Let 
us try and understand why there should have 
been two, neither less nor more. 

The reason is to be found in the fact that, in 
religion, in all intercourse between God and 
man, there are two parties, and that each of them 
must have the opportunity to prove what their 
part is in the Covenant. In the Old Covenant 
man had the opportunity given him to prove 
what He could do, with the aid of all the means 
of grace God could bestow. That Covenant 
ended in man proving his own unfaithfulness 
and failure. In the New Covenant, God is to 
prove what He can do with man, all unfaithful 

21 



The Two Covenants 

and feeble as he is, when He is allowed and 
trusted to do all the work. The Old Covenant 
was one dependent on man's obedience, one 
which he could break, and did break (Jer. xxxi. 
32). The New Covenant was one which God 
has engaged shall never be broken ; He Himself 
keeps it and ensures our keeping it : so He makes 
it an Everlasting Covenant. 

It will repay us richly to look a little deeper 
into this. This relation of- God to fallen man in 
covenant is the same as it was to unfallen man 
as Creator. And what was that relation ? God 
proposed to make a man in His own image and 
likeness. The chief glory of God is that He has 
life in Himself; that He is independent of all else, 
and owes what He is to Himself alone. If the 
image and likeness of God was not to be a mere 
name, and man was really to be like God in the 
power to make himself what he was to be, he 
must needs have the power of free will and self- 
determination. This was the problem God had 
to solve in man's creation in His image. Man 
was to be a creature made by God, and yet he 
was to be, as far as a creature could be, like 
God, self-made. In all God's treatment of man 
these two factors were ever to be taken into ac- 
count. God was ever to take the initiative, and 

22 



The Two Covenants : Their Relation 

be to man the source of life. Man was ever to 
be the recipient, and yet at the same time the 
disposer of the life God bestowed. 

When man had fallen through sin, and God 
entered into a covenant of salvation, these two 
sides of the relationship had still to be main- 
tained intact. God was ever to be the first, and 
man the second. And yet man, as made in 
God's image, was ever, as second, to have full 
time and opportunity to appropriate or reject 
what God gave, to prove how far he could help 
himself, and indeed be self-made. His absolute 
dependence upon God was not to be forced upon 
him; if it was really to be a thing of moral 
worth and true blessedness, it must be his delib- 
erate and voluntary choice. And this now is the 
reason why there was a first and a second cove- 
nant, that in the first, man's desires and efforts 
might be fully awakened, and time given for him 
to make full proof of what his human nature, 
with the aid of outward instruction and miracles 
and means of grace, could accomplish. When 
his utter impotence, his hopeless captivity under 
the power of sin had been discovered, there came 
the New Covenant, in which God was to reveal 
how man's true liberty from sin and self and the 
creature, his true nobility and Godlikeness, was 

23 



The Two Covenants 

to be found in the most entire and absolute de- 
pendence, in God's being and doing all within 
him. 

In the very nature of things there was no other 
way possible to God than this in dealing with a 
being whom He had endowed with the Godlike 
power of a will. And all the weight this reason 
for the Divine procedure has in God's dealing 
with His people as a whole, it equally has in 
dealing with the individual. The two covenants 
represent two stages of God's education of man 
and of man's seeking after God. The progress 
and transition from the one to the other is not 
merely chronological or historical; it is organic 
and spiritual. In greater or lesser degree it is 
seen in every member of the body, as well as in 
the body as a whole. Under the Old Covenant 
there were men in whom, by anticipation, the 
powers of the coming redemption worked 
mightily. In the New Covenant there are men 
in whom the spirit of the Old still makes itself 
manifest. The New Testament proves, in some 
of its most important epistles, — especially those 
to the Galatians, Romans, and Hebrews, — how 
possible it is within the New Covenant still to be 
held fast in the bondage of the Old. 

This is the teaching of the passage from which 
24 



The Two Covenants : Their Relation 

our text is taken. In the home of Abraham, the 
father of the faithful, Ishmael and Isaac are both 
found — the one born of a slave, the other of a 
free woman; the one after the flesh and the will 
of man, the other through the promise and the 
power of God; the one only for a time, then to 
be cast out, the other to be heir of all. A pic- 
ture held up to the Galatians of the life they were 
leading, as they trusted to the flesh and its re- 
ligion, making a fair show, and yet proved, by 
their being led captive to sin, to be, not of the 
free but of the bondwoman. Only through 
faith in the promise and the mighty quickening 
power of God could they, could any of them, be 
made truly and fully free, and stand in the free- 
dom with which Christ has made us free. 

As we proceed to study the two covenants in 
the light of this and other scriptures, we shall 
see how they are indeed the Divine revelation of 
two systems of religious worship, each with its 
spirit or life-principle ruling every man who pro- 
fesses to be a Christian. We shall see how the 
one great cause of the feebleness of so many 
Christians is just this, that the Old Covenant 
spirit of bondage still has the mastery. And we 
shall see that nothing but a spiritual insight, with 
a whole-hearted acceptance, and a living experi- 

25 



The Two Covenants 

ence, of all the New Covenant engages that God 
will work in us, can possibly fit for walking as 
God would have us do. 

This truth of there being two stages in our 
service of God, two degrees of nearness in our 
worship, is typified in many things in the Old 
Covenant worship; perhaps nowhere more 
clearly than in the difference between the Holy 
Place and the Most Holy Place in the temple, 
with the veil separating them. Into the former 
the priests might always enter to draw near to 
God. And yet they might not come too near; 
the veil kept them at a distance. To enter 
within that, was death. Once a year the High 
Priest might enter, as a promise of the time when 
the veil should be taken away and the full access 
to dwell in God's presence be given to His peo- 
ple. In Christ's death the veil of the temple was 
rent, and His blood gives us boldness and power 
to enter into the Holiest of all and live there day 
by day in the immediate presence of God. It is 
by the Holy Spirit, who issued forth from that 
Holiest of all, where Christ had entered, to bring 
its life to us, and make us one with it, that we 
can have the power to live and walk alway with 
the consciousness of God's presence in us. 

It is thus not only in Abraham's home that there 

26 



The Two Covenants: Their Relation 

were the types of the two covenants, the spirit 
of bondage and the spirit of liberty, but even in 
God's home in the temple. The priests had not 
yet the liberty of access into the Father's pres- 
ence. Not only among the Galatians, but every- 
where throughout the Church, there are to be 
found two classes of Christians. Some are con- 
tent with the mingled life, half flesh and half 
spirit, half self-effort and half grace. Others are 
not content with this, but are seeking with their 
whole heart to know to the full what the deliver- 
ance from sin and what the abiding full power 
for a walk in God's presence is, which the New 
Covenant has brought and can give. God help 
us all to be satisfied with nothing less. 1 

1 See Note A, on the Second Blessing. 



27 



Ill 

THE FIRST COVENANT 

1 ' Now therefore, if ye will obey My voice, and 
keep My covenant, ye shall be a peculiar treasure 
unto Me." — Ex. xix. 5. 

"He declared unto you His covenant, which 
He commanded you to perform, even ten com- 
mandtnents." — Deut. iv. 13. 

" If ye keep these judgments, the Lord thy God 
shall keep unto thee the covenant" — Deut. vii. 12. 

"/ will make a new covenant with the house of 
Israel, not according to the covenant which I 
made with their fathers, which My covenant they 
brake" — Jer. xxxi. 31, 32. 

We have seen how the reason for there being 
two Covenants is to be found in the need of 
giving the Divine and the human will, each their 
due place in the working out of man's destiny. 
God ever takes the initiative. Man must then 
have the opportunity to do his part, and to prove 
either what he can do, or needs to have done for 
him. The Old Covenant was on the one hand 
indispensably necessary to waken man's desires, 
to call forth his efforts, to deepen the sense of 

28 



The First Covenant 

dependence on God, to convince of his sin and 
impotence, and so to prepare him to feel the 
need of the salvation of Christ. In the significant 
language of Paul, " The law was our schoolmaster 
unto Christ." " We were kept under the law, shut 
up unto the faith, which should afterward be re- 
vealed." To understand the Old Covenant aright 
we must ever remember its two great character- 
istics — the one, that it was of Divine appoint- 
ment, fraught with much true blessing, and ab- 
solutely indispensable for the working out of 
God's purposes; the other, that it was only pro- 
visional and preparatory to something higher, 
and therefore absolutely insufficient for giving 
that full salvation which man needs if his heart 
or the heart of God is to be satisfied. 

Note now the terms of this first Covenant. 
" If ye will obey My voice and keep My cove- 
nant, ye shall be unto Me a holy nation." Or, as 
it is expressed in Jeremiah (vii. 23, xi. 4), "Obey 
My voice, and I will be your God." Obedience 
everywhere, especially in the Book of Deuter- 
onomy, appears as the condition of blessing. 
"A blessing, if ye obey" (xi. 27). Some may 
ask how God could make a covenant of which 
He knew that man could not keep it. The 
answer opens up to us the whole nature and 

29 



The Two Covenants 

object of the Covenant. All education, Divine 
or human, ever deals with its pupils on the 
principle — faithfulness in the less is essential to 
the attainment of the greater. In taking Israel 
into His training, God dealt with them as men in 
whom, with all the ruin sin had brought, there 
still was a conscience to judge of good and evil, 
a heart capable of being stirred to long after 
God, and a will to choose the good and to choose 
Himself. Before Christ and His salvation could 
be revealed and understood and truly appreciated, 
these faculties of man had to be stirred and 
wakened. The law took men into its training, 
and sought, if I may use the expression, to make 
the very best that could be made of them by 
external instruction. In the provision made in 
the law for a symbolical atonement and pardon, 
in all God's revelation of Himself through priest 
and prophet and king, in His interposition in 
providence and grace, everything was done that 
He could do, to touch and win the heart of His 
people and to give force to the appeal to their 
self-interest or their gratitude, their fear or their 
love. 

Its work was not without fruit. Under the 
law, administered by the grace that ever accom- 
panied it, there was trained up a number of men 

30 



The First Covenant 

whose great mark was the fear of God, and a 
desire to walk blameless in all His command- 
ments. And yet, as a whole, Scripture repre- 
sents the Old Covenant as a failure. The law 
had promised life; but it could not give it (Deut. 
iv. i; Gal. iii. 21). The real purpose for which 
God had given it was the very opposite: it was 
meant by Him as "a ministration of death. " He 
gave it that it might convince man of his sin, 
and might so waken the confession of his im- 
potence, and of his need of a New Covenant and 
a true redemption. It is in this view that Scrip- 
ture uses such strong expressions — "By the law 
is the knowledge of sin : that every mouth may be 
stopped, and the whole world may become guilty 
before God." "The law worketh wrath" "The 
law entered, that the offence might abound" 
"That sin by the commandment might appear 
exceeding sinful" "As many as are of the 
works of the law are under the curse" "We 
were kept under the law, shut up to the faith, 
which should afterward be revealed." "Where- 
fore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us 
to Christ, that we might be justified by faith." 
The great work of the law was to discover what 
sin was: its hatefulness as accursed of God; its 
misery, working temporal and eternal ruin; its 

31 



The Two Covenants 

power, binding man down in hopeless slavery; 
and the need of a Divine interposition as the 
only hope of deliverance. 

In studying the Old Covenant we ought ever 
to keep in mind the twofold aspect under which 
we have seen that Scripture represents it. It 
was God's grace that gave Israel the law, and 
wrought with the law to make it work out its 
purpose in individual believers and in the people 
as a whole. The whole of the Old Covenant 
was a school of grace, an elementary school, to 
prepare for the fullness of grace and truth in 
Christ Jesus. A name is generally given to an 
object according to its chief feature. And so the 
Old Covenant is called a ministration of condem- 
nation and death, not because there was no grace 
in it — it had its own glory (2 Cor. iii. 10-12) — 
but because the law with its curse was the pre- 
dominating element. The combination of the 
two aspects we find with especial clearness in 
Paul's epistles. So he speaks of all who are of 
the works of the law as under the curse (Gal. 
iii. 10). And then almost immediately after he 
speaks of the law as being our benefactor, a 
schoolmaster unto Christ, into whose charge, as 
to a tutor or governor, we had been given, till 
the time appointed of the Father. We are every- 

32 



The First Covenant 

where brought back to what we said above. 
The Old Covenant is absolutely indispensable for 
the preparation work it had to do; utterly insuf- 
ficient to work for us a true or a full redemption. 

The two great lessons God would teach us by 
it are very simple. The one is the lesson of Sin, 
the other the lesson of Holiness. The Old Cove- 
nant attains its object only as it brings men to a 
sense of their utter sinfulness and their hopeless 
impotence to deliver themselves. As long as 
they have not learned this, no offer of the New 
Covenant life can lay hold of them. As long as 
an intense longing for deliverance from sinning 
has not been wrought, they will naturally fall 
back into the power of the law and the flesh. 
The holiness which the New Covenant offers 
will rather terrify than attract them ; the life in 
the spirit of bondage appears to make more al- 
lowance for sin, because obedience is declared to 
be impossible. 

The other is the lesson of Holiness. In the 
New Covenant the Triune God engages to do all. 
He undertakes to give and keep the new heart, 
to give His own Spirit in it, to give the will and 
the power to obey and do His will. As the one 
demand of the first Covenant was the sense of 
sin, the one great demand of the New is faith 

33 



The Two Covenants 

that that need, created by the discipline of God's 
law, will be met in a Divine and supernatural 
way. The law cannot work out its purpose, ex- 
cept as it bring a man to lie guilty and helpless 
before the holiness of God. There the New finds 
him, and reveals that same God, in His grace 
accepting him and making him partaker of His 
holiness. 

This book is written with a very practical pur- 
pose. Its object is to help believers to know 
that wonderful New Covenant of grace which 
God has made with them, and to lead them into 
the living and daily enjoyment of the blessed life 
it secures them. The practical lesson taught us 
by the fact that there was a first Covenant, that 
its one special work was to convince of sin, and 
that without it the New Covenant could not 
come, is just what many Christians need. At 
conversion they were convinced of sin by the 
Holy Spirit. But this had chiefly reference to 
the guilt of sin, and, in some degree, to its hate- 
fulness. But a real knowledge of the power of 
sin, of their entire and utter impotence to cast it 
out, or to work in themselves what is good, is 
what they did not learn at once. And until they 
have learned this, they cannot possibly enter fully 

into the blessing of the New Covenant. It is 

34 



The First Covenant 

when a man sees that, as little as he could raise 
himself from the dead, can he make or keep his 
own soul alive, that he becomes capable of ap- 
preciating the New Testament promise, and is 
made willing to wait on God to do all in him. 

Do you, my reader, feel that you are not fully 
living in the New Covenant, that there is still 
somewhat of the Old-Covenant spirit of bondage 
in you ? — do come, and let the Old Covenant fin- 
ish its work in you. Accept its teaching, that all 
your efforts are failures. As, at conversion, you 
were content to fall down as a condemned, 
death-deserving sinner, be content now to sink 
down before God in the confession that, as His 
redeemed child, you still feel yourself utterly im- 
potent to do and be what you see He asks of 
you. And begin to ask whether the New Cove- 
nant has not perhaps a provision you have never 
yet understood for meeting your impotence and 
giving you the strength to do what is well-pleas- 
ing to God. You will find the wonderful answer 
in the assurance that God, by His Holy Spirit, 
undertakes to work everything in you. 



35 



IV 

THE NEW COVENANT 

" But this is the covenant that I will make with 
the house of Israel ; After those days, saith the 
Lord, I will put My law in their inward parts, 
and write it in their hearts ; and will be their 
God, and they shall be My people. And they 
shall teach no more every man his neighbor, say- 
ing, Know the Lord : for they shall all know Me, 
from the least of them unto the greatest of them, 
for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will re- 
member their sin no more." — Jer. xxxi. 33, 34. 

Isaiah has often been called the evangelical 
prophet, for the wonderful clearness with which 
.he announces the coming Redeemer, both in His 
humiliation and suffering, and in the glory of the 
kingdom He was to establish. And yet it was 
given to Jeremiah, in this passage, and to Ezekiel, 
in the parallel one, to foretell what would actu- 
ally be the outcome of the Redeemer's work and 
the essential character of the salvation He was to 
effect, with a distinctness which is nowhere 
found in the older prophet. In words which the 
New Testament (Hebrews viii.) takes as the di- 
vinely inspired revelation of what the New Cove- 

36 



The New Covenant 

nant is of which Christ is the Mediator, God's 
plan is revealed, and we are shown what it is 
that He will do in us, to make us fit and worthy 
of being the people of which He is the God. 
Through the whole of the Old Covenant there 
was always one trouble: man's heart was not 
right with God. In the New Covenant the evil 
is to be remedied. Its central promise is a heart 
delighting in God's law and capable of knowing 
and holding fellowship with Him. Let us mark 
the fourfold blessing spoken of. 

i . " / will put My law in their inward parts, 
and write it in their hearts." Let us understand 
this well. In our inward parts, or in our heart, 
there are no separate chambers in which the law 
can be put, while the rest of the heart can be 
given up to other things; the heart is a unity. 
Nor are the inward parts and the heart like a 
house, which can be filled with things of an en- 
tirely different nature from what the walls are 
made of, without any living organic connection. 
No ; the inward parts, the heart, are the disposi- 
tion, the love, the will, the life. Nothing can be 
put into the heart, and especially by God, with- 
out entering and taking possession of it, without 
securing its affection and controlling its whole 
being. And this is what God undertakes to do 

37 



The Two Covenants 

in the power of His divine life and operation, to 
breathe the very spirit of His law into and 
through the whole inward being. "I will put it 
into their inward parts, and write it in their 
hearts." At Sinai the tables of the Covenant, 
with the law written on them, were of stone, 
as a lasting substance. It is easy to know what 
that means. The stone was wholly set apart for 
this one thing — to carry and show this Divine 
writing. The writing and the stone were insep- 
arably connected. And so the heart in which 
God gets His way, and writes His law in power, 
lives only and wholly to carry that writing, and 
is unchangeably identified with it. So alone can 
God realize His purpose in creation, and have His 
child of one mind and one spirit with Himself, 
delighting in doing His will. When the Old 
Covenant with the law graven on stone had done 
its work in the discovering and condemning of 
sin, the New Covenant would give in its stead 
the life of obedience and true holiness of heart. 
The whole of the Covenant blessing centres in 
this— the heart being put right and fitted to know. 
God: " I will give them an heart to know Me, 
that I am the Lord; and they shall be My people, 
and I will be their God ; for they shall return unto 
Me with their whole heart" (Jer. xxiv. 7). 

38 



The New Covenant 

2. "And I will be their God, and they shall 
be My people " Do not pass these words lightly. 
They occur chiefly in Jeremiah and Ezekiel in 
connection with the promise of the everlasting 
Covenant. They express the very highest ex- 
perience of the Covenant relationship. It is only 
when His people learn to love and obey His law, 
when their heart and life are together wholly de- 
voted to Him and His will, that He can be to 
them the altogether inconceivable blessing which 
these words express, " I will be your God" All 
I am and have as God shall be yours. All you 
can need or wish for in a God, I will be to you. 
In the fullest meaning of the word, I, the Omni- 
present, will be ever present with you, in all My 
grace and love. I, the Almighty One, will each 
moment work all in you by My mighty power. 
I, the Thrice-Holy One, will reveal My sanctify- 
ing life within you. I will be your God. And 
ye shall be My people, saved and blessed, ruled 
and guided and provided for by Me, known and 
seen to be indeed the people of the Holy One, 
the God of glory. Only let us give our hearts 
time to meditate and wait for the Holy Spirit to 
work in us all that these words mean. 

3. " And they shall teach no more every man 

his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, 

39 



The Two Covenants 

Know the Lord, for they shall all know Me, from 
the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith 
the Lord." Individual personal fellowship with 
God, for the feeblest and the least, is to be the 
wonderful privilege of every member of the 
New Covenant people. Each one will know the 
Lord. That does not mean the knowledge of 
the mind, — that is not the equal privilege of all, 
and that in itself may hinder the fellowship more 
than help it, — but with that knowledge which 
means appropriation and assimilation, and which 
is eternal life. As the Son knew the Father be- 
cause He was one with Him and dwelt in Him, 
the child of God will receive by the Holy Spirit 
that spiritual illumination which will make God 
to him the One he knows best, because he loves 
Him most and lives in Him. The promise, 
"They shall be all taught of God," will be ful- 
filled by the Holy Spirit's teaching. God will 
speak to each out of His Word what he needs to 
know. 

4. "For I will forgive their iniquities, and I 
will remember their sin no more" The word for 
shows that this is the reason of all that precedes. 
Because the blood of this New Covenant was of 
such infinite worth, and its Mediator and High 

Priest in heaven of such Divine power, there is 

40 



The New Covenant 

promised in it such a Divine blotting out of sin 
that God cannot remember it. It is this entire 
blotting out of sin that cleanses and sets us free 
from its power, so that God can write His law 
in our hearts, and show Himself in power as our 
God, and by His Spirit reveal to us His deep 
things — the deep mystery of Himself and His 
love. It is the atonement and redemption of 
Jesus Christ wrought without us and for us, that 
has removed every obstacle and made it meet for 
God, and made us meet, that the law in the 
heart, and the claim on our God, and the knowl- 
edge of Him, should now be our daily life and 
our eternal portion. 

Here we now have the Divine summary of the 
New Covenant inheritance. The last-named 
blessing, the pardon of sin, is the first in order, 
the root of all. The second, having God as our 
God, and the third, the Divine teaching, are the 
fruit. The tree itself that grows on this root, 
and bears such fruit, is what is named first— the 
law in the heart. 1 

The central demand of the Old Covenant, 
Obey My voice, and I will be your God, has now 
been met. With the law written in the heart, 
He can be our God, and we shall be His people. 

1 On the law written in the heart, see Note B. 

41 



The Two Covenants 

Perfect harmony with God's will, holiness in 
heart and life, is the only thing that can satisfy 
God's heart or ours. And it is this the New 
Covenant gives in Divine power, "I will give 
them an heart to know Me; and I will be their 
God, and they shall be My people; for they shall 
turn to Me with their whole hearty It is on the 
state of the heart, it is on the new heart, as 
given by God, that the New Covenant life hinges. 
But why, if all this is meant to be literally and 
exactly true of God's people, why do we see so 
little of this life, experience so little in ourselves ? 
There is but one answer: Because of your un- 
belief ! We have spoken of the relation of God 
and man in creation as what the New Covenant 
is meant to make possible and real. But the law 
cannot be repealed that God will not compel. 
He can only fulfill His purpose as the heart is 
willing and accepts His offer. In the New Cove- 
nant all is of faith. Let us turn away from what 
human wisdom and human experience may say, 
and ask God Himself to teach us what His Cove- 
nant means. If we persevere in this prayer in a 
humble and teachable spirit, we can count most 
certainly on its promise: "They shall no more 
every man teach his neighbor: Know the Lord, 

for they shall all know Me." The teaching of 

42 



The New Covenant 

God Himself, by the Holy Spirit, to make us 
understand what He says to us in His Word, is 
our Covenant right. Let us count upon it. It 
is only by a God-given faith that we can appro- 
priate these God-given promises. And it is only 
by a God-given teaching and inward illumination 
that we can see their meaning, so as to believe 
them. When God teaches us the meaning of 
His promises in a heart yielded to His Holy 
Spirit, then alone we can believe and receive 
them in a power which makes them a reality in 
our life. 

But is it really possible, amid the wear and 
tear of daily life, to walk in the experience of 
these blessings ? Are they really meant for all 
God's children ? Let us rather ask the question, 
Is it possible for God to do what He has prom- 
ised ? The one part of the promise we believe — 
the complete and perfect pardon of sin. Why 
should we not believe the other part — the law 
written in the heart, and the direct Divine fel- 
lowship and teaching? We have been so ac- 
customed to separate what God has joined 
together, the objective, outward work of His 
Son, and the subjective, inward work of His 
Spirit, that we consider the glory of the New 
Covenant above the Old to consist chiefly in the 

43 



The Two Covenants 

redeeming work of Christ for us, and not 
equally in the sanctifying work of the Spirit 
in us. It is owing to this ignorance and un- 
belief of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, as the 
power through whom God fulfills the New Cove- 
nant promises, that we do not really expect them 
to be made true to us. 

Do let us turn our hearts away from all past 
experience of failure, as caused by nothing but 
unbelief ; do let us admit fully and heartily, what 
failure has taught us, the absolute impossibility 
of even a regenerate man walking in God's law 
in his own strength, and then turn our hearts 
quietly and trustfully to our own Covenant God. 
Let us hear what He says He will do for us, and 
belieVe Him; let us rest on His unchangeable 
faithfulness and the surety of the Covenant, on 
His Almighty power and the Holy Spirit work- 
ing in us; and let us give up ourselves to Him as 
our God. He will prove that what He has done 
for us in Christ is not one whit more wonderful 
than what He will do in us every day by the 
Spirit of Christ. 



44 



V 

THE TWO COVENANTS— IN CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE 

"These women are two covenants: one from 
Mount Sinai, bearing children unto bondage, 
which is Hagar. Now this Hagar answer eth to 
Jerusalem that now is, for she is in bondage with 
her children. But the Jerusalem which is above 
is free, which is our mother. So then, brethren, 
we are not children of the bondwoman, but of the 
free. With freedom Christ set us free. Stand 
fast, therefore, and be not entangled again in a 
yoke of bondage." — Gal. iv. 24-31, v. 1. 

The house of Abraham was the Church of God 
of that age. The division in his house, one son, 
his own son, but born after the flesh, the other 
after the promise, was a divinely-ordained mani- 
festation of the division there would be in all 
ages between the children of the bondwoman, 
those who served God in the spirit of bondage, 
and those who were children of the free, and 
served Him in the Spirit of His Son. The pas- 
sage teaches us what the whole Epistle confirms : 
that the Galatians had become entangled with a 
yoke of bondage, and were not standing fast in 

the freedom with which Christ makes free in- 

45 



The Two Covenants 

deed. Instead of living in the New Covenant, in 
the Jerusalem which is from above, in the liberty 
which the Holy Spirit gives, their whole walk 
proved that, though Christians, they were of the 
Old Covenant, which bringeth forth children 
unto bondage. The passage teaches us the great 
truth, which it is of the utmost consequence for 
us to apprehend thoroughly, that a man, with a 
measure of the knowledge and experience of the 
grace of God, may prove, by a legal spirit, that 
he is yet practically, to a large extent, under the 
Old Covenant. And it will show us, with won- 
derful clearness, what the proofs are of the ab- 
sence of the true New Covenant life. 

A careful study of the Epistle shows us that 
the difference between the two Covenants is 
seen in three things. The law and its works is 
contrasted with the hearing of faith, the flesh 
and its religion with the flesh crucified, the im- 
potence to good with a walk in the liberty and 
the power of the Spirit. May the Holy Spirit 
reveal to us this twofold life. 

The first antithesis we find in Paul's words, 

" Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law, 

or the hearing of faith?" These Galatians had 

indeed been born into the New Covenant; they 

had received the Holy Spirit. But they had been 

46 



In Christian Experience 

led away by Jewish teachers, and, though they 
had been justified by faith, they were seeking to 
be sanctified by works; they were looking for 
the maintenance and the growth of their Chris- 
tian life to the observance of the law. They had 
not understood that, equally with the beginning, 
the progress of the Divine life is alone by faith, 
day by day receiving its strength from Christ 
alone; that in Jesus Christ nothing avails but 
faith working by love. 

Almost every believer makes the same mistake 
as the Galatian Christians. Very few learn at 
conversion at once that it is only by faith that 
we stand, and walk, and live. They have no 
conception of the meaning of Paul's teaching 
about being dead to the law, freed from the law 
— about the freedom with which Christ makes 
us free. "As many as are led by the Spirit are 
not under the law." Regarding the law as a Di- 
vine ordinance for our direction, they consider 
themselves prepared and fitted by conversion to 
take up the fulfillment of the law as a natural 
duty. They know not that, in the New Cove- 
nant, the law written in the heart needs an un- 
ceasing faith in a Divine power, to enable us by 
a Divine power to keep it. They cannot under- 
stand that it is not to the law, but to a Living 

47 



The Two Covenants 

Person, that we are now bound, and that our 
obedience and holiness are only possible by the 
unceasing faith in His power ever working in 
us. It is only when this is seen, that we are 
prepared truly to live in the New Covenant.. 

The second word, that reveals the Old Cove- 
nant spirit, is the word " flesh." Its contrast 
is, the flesh crucified. Paul asks: "Are ye so 
foolish? Having begun in the Spirit, are ye 
made perfect in the flesh ? " Flesh means our 
sinful human nature. At his conversion the 
Christian has generally no conception of the ter- 
rible evil of his nature, and the subtlety with 
which it offers itself to take part in the service 
of God. It may be most willing and diligent in 
God's service for a time; it may devise number- 
less observances for making His worship pleas- 
ing and attractive; and yet this may be all only 
what Paul calls " making a fair show in the flesh," 
"glorying in the flesh," in man's will and man's 
efforts. This power of the religious flesh is one 
of the great marks of the Old Covenant religion; 
it misses the deep humility and spirituality of the 
true worship of God — a heart and life entirely 
dependent upon Him. 

The proof that our religion is very much that 
of the religious flesh, is that the sinful flesh will 

48 



In Christian Experience 

be found to flourish along with it. It was thus 
with the Galatians. While they were making a 
fair show in the flesh, and glorying in it, their 
daily life was full of bitterness and envy and 
hatred, and other sins. They were biting and 
devouring one another. Religious flesh and sin- 
ful flesh are one: no wonder that, with a great 
deal of religion, temper and selfishness and 
worldliness are so often found side by side. The 
religion of the flesh cannot conquer sin. 

What a contrast to the religion of the New 
Covenant! What is the place the flesh has 
there? "They that are Christ's have crucified 
the flesh, with its desires and affections/' Scrip- 
ture speaks of the will of the flesh, the mind of 
the flesh, the lust of the flesh ; all this the true 
believer has seen to be condemned and crucified 
in Christ: he has given it over to the death. He 
not only accepts the Cross, with its bearing of 
the curse, and its redemption from it, as his en- 
trance into life; he glories in it as his only power 
day by day to overcome the flesh and the world. 
"lam crucified with Christ.'' "God forbid that 
I should glory save in the cross of my Lord Jesus 
Christ, by which I am crucified to the world." 
Even as nothing less than the death of Christ was 
needed to inaugurate the New Covenant, and the 

49 



The Two Covenants 

resurrection life that animates it, there is no en- 
trance into the true New Covenant life other than 
by a partaking of that death. 

" Fallen from grace." This is a third word 
that describes the condition of these Galatians in 
that bondage in which they were really impotent 
to all true good. Paul is not speaking of a final 
falling away here, for he still addresses them as 
Christians, but of their having wandered from 
that walk in the way of enabling and sanctifying 
grace, in which a Christian can get the victory 
over sin. As long as grace is principally con- 
nected with pardon and the entrance to the Chris- 
tian life, the flesh is the only power in which to 
serve and work. But when we know what ex- 
ceeding abundance of grace has been provided, 
and how God " makes all grace abound, that we 
may abound to all good works," we know that, 
as it is by faith, so too it is by grace alone that 
we stand a single moment or take a single step. 

The contrast to this life of impotence and fail- 
ure is found in the one word, "the Spirit." " If 
ye be led of the Spirit, ye are not under the law," 
with its demand on your own strength. "Walk 
in the Spirit, and ye shall not " — a definite, cer- 
tain promise — "ye shall not fulfill the lusts of the 
flesh." The Spirit gives liberty from the law, 

50 



In Christian Experience 

from the flesh, from sin. "The fruit of the 
Spirit is love, peace, joy." Of the New Covenant 
promise, "I will put My Spirit within you, and / 
will cause you to walk in My statutes, and ye 
shall keep My judgments," the Spirit is the cen- 
tre and the sum. He is the power of the super- 
natural life of true obedience and holiness. 

And what would have been the course that the 
Galatians would have taken if they had accepted 
this teaching of St. Paul ? As they hear his 
question, "Now that ye have come to know 
God, how turn ye back again into the weak and 
beggarly rudiments, whereunto ye desire to be in 
bondage again ?" they would have felt that there 
was but one course. Nothing else could help 
them but at once to turn back again to the path 
they had left. At the point where they had left 
it, they could enter again. With any one of 
them who wished to do so, this turning away 
from the Old Covenant legal spirit, and the re- 
newed surrender to the Mediator of the New 
Covenant, could be the act of a moment — one 
single step. As the light of the New Covenant 
promise dawned upon him, and he saw how 
Christ was to be all, and faith all, and the Holy 
Spirit in the heart all, and the faithfulness of a 
Covenant-keeping God all in all, he would feel 

51 



The Two Covenants 

that he had but one thing to do — in utter impo- 
tence to yield himself to God, and in simple faith 
to count upon Him to perform what He had 
spoken. In Christian experience there may be 
still the Old Covenant life of bondage and fail- 
ure. In Christian experience there may be a life 
that gives way entirely to the New Covenant 
grace and spirit. In Christian experience, when 
the true vision has been received of what the 
New Covenant means, a faith that rests fully on 
the Mediator of the New Covenant can enter at 
once into the life which the Covenant secures. 

I cannot too earnestly beg all believers who 
long to know to the utmost what the grace of 
God can work in them, to study carefully the 
question as to whether the acknowledgment that 
our being in the bondage of the Old Covenant is 
the reason of our failure, and whether a clear in- 
sight into the possibility of an entire change in 
our relation to God, is not what is needed to 
give us the help we seek. We may be seeking 
for our growth in a more diligent use of the 
means of grace, and a more earnest striving to 
live in accordance with God's will, and yet en- 
tirely fail. The reason is, that there is a secret 
root of evil which must be removed. That root 
is the spirit of bondage, the legal spirit of self- 

52 



In Christian Experience 

effort, which hinders that humble faith that 
knows that God will work all, and yields to Him 
to do it. That spirit may be found amidst very 
great zeal for God's service, and very earnest 
prayer for His grace; it does not enjoy the rest 
of faith, and cannot overcome sin, because it 
does not stand in the liberty with which Christ 
has made us free, and does not know that where 
the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. There 
the soul can say: "The law of the Spirit of life 
in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of 
sin and death." When once we admit heartily, 
not only that there are failings in our life, but 
that there is something radically wrong that can 
be changed, we shall turn with a new interest, 
with a deeper confession of ignorance and im- 
potence, with a hope that looks to God alone for 
teaching and strength, to find that in the New 
Covenant there is an actual provision for every 
need. 



53 



VI 

THE EVERLASTING COVENANT 

" They shall be My people, and I will be their 
God. And I will make an everlasting covenant 
with them, that I will not turn away from them, 
to do them good; but I will put My fear in their 
hearts, that they shall not depart from Me" — 
Jer. xxxii. 38, 40. 

"A new heart also will I give you, and a new 
spirit will I put within you : and I will take the 
stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you 
an heart of flesh. And I will put My Spirit 
within you, and cause you to walk in My statutes, 
and ye shall keep My judgments, and do them. 
Moreover, I will make a covenant of peace with 
them : it shall be an everlasting covenant with 
them."— Ezek. xxxvi. 26, 27, xxxvii. 26. 

We have had the words of the institution of 
the New Covenant. Let us listen to the further 
teaching we have concerning it in Jeremiah and 
Ezekiel, where God speaks of it as an everlasting 
Covenant. 

In every covenant there are two parties. And 

the very foundation of a covenant rests on the 

thought that each party is to be faithful to the 

54 



The Everlasting Covenant 

part it has undertaken to perform. Unfaithful- 
ness on either side breaks the covenant. 

It was thus with the Old Covenant. God had 
said to Israel, Obey My voice, and I will be your 
God (Jer. vii. 23, xi. 4). These simple words 
contained the whole Covenant. And when Is- 
rael disobeyed, the Covenant was broken. The 
question of Israel being able or not able to obey 
was not taken into consideration: disobedience 
forfeited the privileges of the Covenant. 

If a New Covenant were to be made, and if 
that was to be better than the Old, this was the 
one thing to be provided for. No New Covenant 
could be of any profit unless provision were 
made for securing obedience. Obedience there 
must loe. God as Creator could never take His 
creatures into His favor and fellowship, except 
they obeyed Him. The thing would have been 
an impossibility. If the New Covenant is to be 
better than the Old, if it is to be an everlasting 
Covenant, never to be broken, it must make 
some sufficient provision for securing the obedi- 
ence of the Covenant people. 

And this is indeed the glory of the New Cove- 
nant, the glory that excelleth, that this provision 
has been made. In a way that no human thought 

could have devised, by a stipulation that never 

55 



The Two Covenants 

entered into any human covenant, by an under- 
taking in which God's infinite condescension 
and power and faithfulness are to be most 
wonderfully exhibited, by a supernatural mys- 
tery of Divine wisdom and grace, the New 
Covenant provides a guarantee, not only for 
God's faithfulness, but for man's too! And this 
in no other way than by God Himself undertaking 
to secure man's part as well as His own. Do try 
and get hold of this. 

It is just because this, the essential part of the 
New Covenant, so exceeds and confounds all 
human thoughts of what a covenant means, that 
Christians, from the Galatians downward, have 
not been able to see and believe what the New 
Covenant really means. They have thought that 
human unfaithfulness was a factor permanently 
to be reckoned with as something utterly uncon- 
querable and incurable, and that the possibility of 
a life of obedience, with the witness from within 
of a good conscience, and from above of God's 
pleasure, was not to be expected. They have 
therefore sought to stir the mind to its utmost by 
arguments and motives, and never realized how 
the Holy Spirit is to be the unceasing, universal, 
all-sufficient worker of everything that has to be 
wrought by the Christian. 

56 



The Everlasting Covenant 

Let us beseech God earnestly that He would 
reveal to us by the Holy Spirit the things that He 
hath prepared for them that love Him; things 
that have not entered into the heart of man ; the 
wonderful life of the New Covenant. All 
depends upon our knowledge of what God will 
work in us. Listen to what God says in Jere- 
miah of the two parts of His everlasting Cove- 
nant, shortly after He had announced the New 
Covenant, and in further elucidation of it. The 
central thought of that, that the heart is to be put 
right, is here reiterated and confirmed. i( I will 
make an everlasting covenant with them, that I 
will not turn away from them, to do them goody 
That is, God will be unchangeably faithful. He 
will not turn from us. "But / will put My fear 
into their heart, that they shall not depart from 
Me" This is the second half: Israel will be un- 
changeably faithful too. And that because God 
will so put His fear in their heart, that they shall 
not depart from Him. As little as God will turn 
from them, will they depart from Him! As 
faithfully as He undertakes for the fulfillment of 
His part, will He undertake for the fulfillment 
of their part, that they shall not depart from 
Him! 

Listen to God's word in Ezekiel, in regard to 

57 



The Two Covenants 

one of the terms of His Covenant of peace, His 
everlasting Covenant. (Ezek. xxxiv. 25, xxxvi. 
27, xxxvii. 26): "I will put My Spirit within 
you, and cause you to walk in My statutes, and ye 
shall keep My judgments, and do them." In the 
Old Covenant we have nothing of this sort. 
You have, on the contrary, from the story of the 
golden calf and the breaking of the Tables of the 
Covenant onward, the sad fact of continual de- 
parture from God. We find God longing for 
what He would so fain have seen, but was not 
to be found. " O that there were such an heart 
in them, that they would fear Me, and keep all 
My commandments always" (Deut. v. 29). We 
find throughout the Book of Deuteronomy, a 
thing without parallel in the history of any 
religion or religious lawgiver, that Moses most 
distinctly prophesies their forsaking of God, 
with the terrible curses and dispersion that 
would come upon them. It is only at the close 
of his threatenings (Deut. xxx. 6) that he gives 
the promise of the new time that would come: 
"The Lord thy God will circumcise thine heart, 
to love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, 
and with all thy soul, and thou shalt obey the 
voice of the Lord thy God." The whole Old 
Covenant was dependent on man's faithfulness: 

58 



The Everlasting Covenant 

" The Lord thy God keepeth covenant with them 
that keep His commandments. " God's keeping 
the Covenant availed little, if man did not keep 
it. Nothing could help man until the " If ye 
shall diligently keep " of the law was replaced by 
the word of promise, "I will put My Spirit in 
you, and ye shall keep My judgments, and do 
them." The one supreme difference of the New 
Covenant; the one thing for which the Mediator, 
and the Blood, and the Spirit were given; the one 
fruit God sought and Himself engaged to bring 
forth was this: a heart filled with His fear and 
love, a heart to cleave unto Him and not depart 
from Him, a heart in which His Spirit and His 
law dwells, a heart that delights to do His will. 

Here is the inmost secret of the New Covenant. 
It deals with the heart of man in a way of Divine 
power. It not only appeals to the heart by every 
motive of fear or love, of duty or gratitude. That 
the law also did. But it reveals God Himself, 
cleansing our heart and making it new, changing 
it entirely from a stony heart into a heart of flesh, 
a tender, living, loving heart, putting His Spirit 
within it, and so, by His Almighty Power and 
Love, breathing and working in it, making the 
promise true, "/ will cause you to walk in My 
statutes, and ye shall keep My judgments." A 

59 



The Two Covenants 

heart in perfect harmony with Himself, a life 
and walk in His way — God has engaged in 
Covenant to work this in us. He undertakes 
for our part in the Covenant as much as for His 
own. 

This is nothing but the restoration of the origi- 
nal relation between God and the man He had 
made in His likeness. He was on earth to be 
the very image of God, because God was to live 
and to work all in him, and he to find his glory 
and blessedness in thus owing all to God. This 
is the exceeding glory of the New Covenant, of 
the Pentecostal dispensation, that by the Holy 
Spirit God could now again be the indwelling 
life of His people, and so make the promise a re- 
ality : " I will cause you to walk in My statutes. " 

With God's presence secured to us every mo- 
ment of the day — "I will not turn away from 
them "; with God's " fear put into our heart" by 
His own Spirit, and our heart thus responding to 
His holy presence; with our hearts thus made 
right with God, we can, we shall walk in His 
statutes, and keep His judgments. 

My brethren, the great sin of Israel under the 
Old Covenant, that by which they greatly grieved 
Him, was this: "they limited the Holy One of 
Israel." Under the New Covenant there is no 

60 



The Everlasting Covenant 

less danger of this sin. // makes it impossible 
for God to fulfill His promises. Let us seek, 
above everything, for the Holy Spirit's teaching, 
to show us exactly what God has established the 
New Covenant for, that we may honor Him by 
believing all that His love has prepared for us. 

And if we ask for the cause of the unbelief, 
that prevents the fulfillment of the promise, we 
shall find that it is not far to seek. It is, in most 
cases, the lack of desire for the promised bless- 
ing. In all who came to Jesus on earth the in- 
tensity of their desire for the healing they needed 
made them ready and glad to believe in His 
word. Where the law has done its full work, 
where the actual desire to be freed from every 
sin is strong, and masters the heart, the presence 
of the New Covenant, when once really under- 
stood, comes like bread to a famishing man.; 
The subtle belief that it is impossible to be kept 
from sinning cuts away the power of accepting 
the promises of the everlasting Testament prom- 
ise. God's Word, "I will put My fear in their 
heart, that they shall not depart from Me"; "I 
will put My Spirit within you, and ye shall keep 
My judgment," is understood in some feeble 
sense, according to our experience, and not ac- 
cording to what the Word and what God means. 

61 



The Two Covenants 

And the soul settles down into a despair, or a 
self-contentment, that says it can never be other- 
wise, and makes true conviction for sin impos- 
sible. 

Let me say to every reader who would fain be 
able to believe fully all that God says: Cherish 
every whisper of the conscience and of the Spirit 
that convinces of sin. Whatever it be, a hasty 
temper, a sharp word, an unloving or impatient 
thought, anything of selfishness or self-will — 
cherish that which condemns it in you, as part 
of the schooling that is to bring you to Christ 
and the full possession of His salvation. The 
New Covenant is meant to meet the need for a 
power of not sinning, which the Old could not 
give. Come with that need; it will prepare and 
open the heart for all the everlasting Covenant 
secures you. 



62 



VII 

THE NEW COVENANT : A MINISTRATION OF THE SPIRIT 

"Ye are an epistle of Christ, ministered by us, 
written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the 
living God ; not on tables of stone, but on tables 
that are hearts of flesh. . . . Our sufficiency 
is of God ; who also made us sufficient as minis- 
ters of the New Covenant ; not of the letter, but 
of the Spirit: for the letter killeth, but the Spirit 
giveth life. For if the ministration of death 
came with glory, how shall not rather the minis- 
tration of the Spirit be with glory ? For if the 
ministration of condemnation is glory, much 
rather doth the ministration of righteousness ex- 
ceed in glory." — 2 Cor. iii. 3, 6-10. 

In this wonderful chapter Paul reminds the 
Corinthians, in speaking of his ministry among 
them, of what its chief characteristics were. As 
a ministry of the New Covenant he contrasts it, 
and the whole dispensation of which it is part, 
with that of the Old. The Old was graven in 
stone, the New in the heart. The Old could be 
written in ink, and was in the letter that killeth; 
the New, of the Spirit that maketh alive. The 
Old was a ministration of condemnation and 

63 



The Two Covenants 

death; the New, of righteousness and life. The 
Old indeed had its glory, for it was of Divine 
appointment, and brought its Divine blessing; 
but it was a glory that passed away, and had no 
glory by reason of the glory that excelleth, the 
exceeding glory of that which remaineth. With 
the Old there was the veil on the heart; in the 
New, the veil is taken away from the face and 
the heart, the Spirit of the Lord gives liberty, 
and, reflecting with unveiled face the glory of 
the Lord, we are changed from glory to glory, 
into the same image, as by the Spirit of the Lord. 
The glory that excelleth proved its power in this, 
that it not only marked the dispensation on its 
Divine side, but exerted its power in the heart 
and life of its subjects, so that it was seen in 
them too, as they were changed by the Spirit 
into Christ's image, from glory to glory. 

Think a moment of the contrast. The Old 
Covenant was of the letter that killeth. The law 
came with its literal instruction, and sought by 
the knowledge it gave of God's will to appeal to 
man's fear and his love, to his natural powers of 
mind and conscience and will. It spoke to him 
as if he could obey, that it might convince him 
of what he did not know, that he could not obey. 
And so it fulfilled its mission: "The command- 

64 



A Ministration of the Spirit 

ment which was unto life, this I found to be 
unto death." In the New, on the contrary, how 
different was everything. Instead of the letter, 
the Spirit that giveth life, that breathes the very 
life of God, the life of heaven into us. Instead 
of a law graven in stone, the law written in the 
heart, worked into the heart's affection and pow- 
ers, making it one with them. Instead of the 
vain attempt to work from without inward, the 
Spirit and the law are put into the inward parts, 
thence to work outward in life and walk. 

This passage brings into view that which is 
the distinctive blessing of the New Covenant. 
In working out our salvation God bestowed upon 
us two wonderful gifts. We read: " God sent 
forth His Son, that He might redeem them that 
were under the law, that we might receive the 
adoption of sons. And because ye are sons, 
God sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your 
hearts, crying, Abba, Father." Here we have 
the two parts of God's work in salvation. The 
one, the more objective, what He did that we 
might become His children — He sent forth His 
Son. The second, the more subjective, what He 
did that we might live like His children: He 
sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts. 
In the former we have the external manifestation 

65 



The Two Covenants 

of the work of redemption; in the other, its in- 
ward appropriation; the former for the sake of 
the latter. These two halves form one great 
whole, and may not be separated. 

In the promises of the New Covenant, as we 
find them in Jeremiah and Ezekiel, as well as in 
our text and many other passages of Scripture, it 
is manifest that God's great object in salvation is 
to get possession of the heart. The heart is the 
real life; with the heart a man loves, and wills, 
and acts; the heart makes the man. God made 
man's heart for His own dwelling, that in it He 
might reveal His love and His glory. God sent 
Christ to accomplish a redemption by which 
man's heart could be won back to Him ; nothing 
but that could satisfy God. And that is what is 
accomplished when the Holy Spirit makes the 
heart of His child what it should be. The whole 
work of Christ's redemption — His Atonement 
and Victory, His Exaltation and Intercession, His 
glory at the right hand of God — all these are only 
preparatory to what is the chief triumph of His 
grace: the renewal of the heart to be the temple 
of God. Through Christ God gives the Holy 
Spirit to glorify Him in the heart, by working 
there all that He has done and is doing for the 
soul. 



A Ministration of the Spirit 

In a great deal of our religious teaching a fear, 
lest we should derogate from the honor of Christ, 
has been alleged as the reason for giving His 
work for us, on the Cross or in heaven, a greater 
prominence than His work in our heart by the 
Holy Spirit. The result has been that the in- 
dwelling of the Holy Spirit, and His mighty 
work as the life of the heart, are very little 
known or experienced. If we look carefully at 
what the New Covenant promises mean, we 
shall see how the " sending forth of the Spirit of 
His Son into our hearts " is indeed the consum- 
mation and crown of Christ's redeeming work. 
Let us just think of what these promises imply. 

In the Old Covenant man had failed in what he 
had to do. In the New, God is to do everything 
in him. The Old could only convict of sin. The 
New is to put it away and cleanse the heart from 
its filthiness. In the Old it was the heart that 
was wrong; for the New a new heart is pro- 
vided, into which God puts His fear and His law 
and His love. The Old demanded, but failed to 
secure obedience; in the New, God causes us to 
walk in His judgments. The New is to fit man 
for a true holiness, a true fulfillment of the law 
of loving God with the whole heart, and our 
neighbors as ourselves, a walk truly well-pleas- 

67 



The Two Covenants 

ing to God. The New changes a man from 
glory to glory after the image of Christ. All be- 
cause the Spirit of God's Son is given into the 
heart. The Old gave no power: in the New all 
is by the Spirit, the mighty power of God. As 
complete as the reign and power of Christ on the 
throne of heaven, is His dominion on the throne 
of the heart by His Holy Spirit given to us. 1 

It is as we bring all these traits of the New 
Covenant life together into one focus, and look at 
the heart of God's child as the object of this 
mighty redemption, that we shall begin to under- 
stand what it secures to us, and what it is that 
we are to expect from our Covenant God. We 
shall see wherein the glory of the ministration of 
the Spirit consists, even in this, that God can fill 
our heart with His love, and make it His abode. 

We are accustomed to say, and truly so, that 
the worth of the Son of God, who came to die 
for us, is the measure of the worth of the soul in 
God's sight, and of the greatness of the work 
that had to be done to save it. Let us even so 
see that the Divine glory of the Holy Spirit, the 
Spirit of the Father and the Son, is the measure 
of God's longing to have our heart wholly for 
Himself, of the glory of the work that is to be 

1 See Note C, on George Miiller. 
68 



A Ministration of the Spirit 

wrought within us, of the power by which that 
work will be accomplished. 

We shall see how the glory of the ministration 
of the Spirit is no other than the glory of the 
Lord, as it is not only in heaven, but resting upon 
us and dwelling in us, and changing us into the 
same image from glory to glory. The incon- 
ceivable glory of our exalted Lord in heaven has 
its counterpart here on earth in the exceeding 
glory of the Holy Spirit who glorifies Him in us, 
who lays His glory on us, as He changes us into 
His likeness. 

The New Covenant has no power to save and 
to bless except as it is a ministration of the Spirit. 
That Spirit works in lesser or greater degree, as 
He is neglected and grieved, or yielded to and 
trusted. Let us honor Him, and give Him His 
place as the Spirit of the New Covenant, by ex- 
pecting and accepting all He waits to do for us. 

He is the great gift of the Covenant. His com- 
ing from heaven was the proof that the Mediator 
of the Covenant was on the throne in glory, and 
could now make us partakers of the heavenly life. 

He is the only teacher of what the Covenant 
means: dwelling in our heart, He wakens there 
the thought and the desire for what God has pre- 
pared for us. 

69 



The Two Covenants 

He is the Spirit of faith, who enables us to be- 
lieve the otherwise incomprehensible blessing and 
power in which the New Covenant works, and 
to claim it as our own. 

He is the Spirit of grace and of power, by 
whom the obedience of the Covenant and the 
fellowship with God can be maintained without 
interruption. 

He Himself is the Possessor and the Bearer and 
the Communicator of all the Covenant promises, 
the Revealer and the Glorifier of Jesus, its Medi- 
ator and Surety. 

To believe fully in the Holy Spirit, as the 
present and abiding and all-comprehending gift 
of the New Covenant, has been to many a one 
an entrance into its fullness of blessing. 

Begin at once, child of God, to give the Holy 
Spirit the place in thy religion He has in God's 
plan. Be still before God, and believe that He 
is within thee, and ask the Father to work in 
thee through Him. Regard thyself, thy spirit as 
well as thy body, with holy reverence as His 
temple. .Let the consciousness of His holy pres- 
ence and working fill thee with holy calm and 
fear. And be sure that all that God calls thee 
to be, Christ through His Spirit will work in 

thee. 

70 



VIII 

THE two covenants: the transition 

"Now the God of peace, -who brought again 
from the dead the great Shepherd of the sheep, in 
the blood of the everlasting covenant, even our 
Lord Jesus, make you perfect in every good thing 
to do. His will, working in us that which is well- 
pleasing in His sight, through Jesus Christ." — 
Heb. xiii. 20, 21. 

The transition from the Old Covenant to the 
New was not slow or gradual, but by a tre- 
mendous crisis. Nothing less than the death of 
Christ was the close of the Old. Nothing less 
than His resurrection from the dead, through the 
blood of the everlasting Covenant, the opening 
of the New. The path of preparation that led 
up to the crisis was long and slow; the rending 
of the veil, that symbolized the end of the old 
worship, was the work of a moment. By a 
death, once for all, Christ's work, as fulfiller of 
law and prophets, as the end of the law, was for- 
ever finished. By a resurrection in the power 
of an endless life, the Covenant of Life was ush- 
ered in. 

71 



The Two Covenants 

These events have an infinite' significance, as 
revealing the character of the Covenants they are 
related to. The death of Christ shows the true 
nature of the Old Covenant. It is elsewhere 
called "a ministration of death" (2 Cor. iii. 7). 
It brought forth nothing but death. It ended in 
death ; only by death could the life that had been 
lived under it be brought to an end. The New 
was to be a Covenant of Life ; it had its birth in 
the omnipotent resurrection power that brought 
Christ from the dead; its one mark and blessing 
is, that all it gives comes, not only as a promise, 
but as an experience, in the power of an endless 
life. The Death reveals the utter inefficacy and 
insufficiency of the Old; the Life brings nigh and 
imparts to us forever all that the New has to 
offer. An insight into the completeness of the 
transition, as seen in Christ, prepares us for ap- 
prehending the reality of the change in our life, 
when, "like as Christ was raised from the dead 
by the glory of the Father, so we also walk in 
newness of life." 

The complete difference between the life in the 

Old and the New is remarkably illustrated by a 

previous passage in the Epistle (Heb. ix. 16). 

After having said that a death for the redemption 

of transgressions had to take place ere the New 

72 



The Two Covenants: The Transition 

Covenant could be established, the writer adds, 
"Where a testament is, there must of necessity 
be the death of him that made it." ■ Before any 
heir can obtain the legacy, its first owner, the 
testator, must have died. The old proprietor- 
ship, the old life, must disappear entirely before 
the new heir, the new life, can enter upon the 
inheritance. Nothing but death can work the 
transference of the property. It is even so with 
Christ, with the Old and the New Covenant life, 
with our own deliverance from the Old and our 
entrance on the New. Now, having been made 
dead to the law by the body of Christ, we have 
been discharged from the law, having died to 
that wherein we were holden — here is the com- 
pleteness of the deliverance from Christ's side; 
" so that we serve " — here is the completeness of 
the change in our experience — "in newness of 
the spirit, and not in oldness of the letter." 

The transition, if it is to be real and whole, 
must take place by a death. As with Christ the 
Mediator of the Covenant, so with His people, 
the heirs of the Covenant. In Him we are dead 
to sin ; in Him we are dead to the law. Just as 



1 The Greek word for covenant and testament is the same. This is the 
only passage where the allusion to a testator makes the meaning testament a. 
necessity. Everywhere else the Revised Version has rightly used cove- 
nant. 

73 



The Two Covenants 

Adam died to God, and we inherit a nature ac- 
tually and really dead in sin, dead to God and 
His kingdom, so in Christ we died to sin, and 
inherit a nature actually dead to sin and its do- 
minion. It is when the Holy Spirit reveals and 
makes real to us this death to sin and to the law 
too, as the one condition of a life to God, that 
the transition from the Old to the New Covenant 
can be fully realized in us. The Old was, and 
was meant to be, a "ministration of death"; 
until it has completely done its work in us there 
is no complete discharge from its power. The 
man who sees that self is incurably evil and must 
die; who gives self utterly to death as he sinks 
before God in utter impotence and the surrender 
to His working; who consents to death with 
Christ on the cross as his desert, and in faith ac- 
cepts it as his only deliverance; he alone is pre- 
pared to be led by the Holy Spirit into the full 
enjoyment of the New Covenant life. He will 
learn to understand how completely death makes 
an end to all self-effort, and how, as he lives in 
Christ to God, everything henceforth is to be the 
work of God Himself. 

See how beautifully our text brings out this 
truth, that just as much as Christ's resurrection 
out of death was the work of God Himself, is 

74 



The Two Covenants : The Transition 

our life equally to be wholly God's own work 
too. Not more direct and wonderful than was 
in Christ the transition from death to life, is to 
be in us the experience of what the New Cove- 
nant life is to bring. Notice the subject of the 
two verses. In ver. 20 we have what God has 
done in raising Christ from the dead; in ver. 21, 
what God is to do in us, working in us what is 
pleasing to Him. (20) "The God of peace, who 
brought from the dead that great Shepherd of 
the sheep, even our Lord Jesus, (21) Make you 
perfect in every good thing to do His will, work- 
ing in you that which is pleasing in His sight, 
through Jesus Christ." We have the name of 
our Lord Jesus twice. In the first case it refers 
to what God has done to Christ for us, rais- 
ing Him; in the second, to what God is doing 
through Christ in us, working His pleasure in' 
us. Because it is the same God continuing in us 
the work He began in Christ, it is in us just what 
it was in Christ. In Christ's death we see Him 
in utter impotence allowing and counting upon 
God to work all and give Him life. God wrought 
the wonderful transition. In us we see the same; 
it is only as we give ourself unto that death too, 
as we entirely cease from self and its works, as 

we lie as in the grave waiting for God to work 

75 



The Two Covenants 

all, that the God of resurrection life can work in 
us all His good pleasure. 

It was "through the blood of the everlasting 
Covenant," with its atonement for sin, and its 
destruction of sin's power, that God effected that 
resurrection. It is through that same blood that 
we are redeemed and freed from the power of 
sin, and made partakers of Christ's resurrection 
life. The more we study the New Covenant, 
the more we shall see that its one aim is to re- 
store man, out of the Fall, to the life in God for 
which he was created. It does this first, by de- 
livering him from the power of sin in Christ's 
death, and then by taking possession of his heart, 
his life, for God to work all in him by the Holy 
Spirit. The whole argument of the Epistles to 
the Hebrews as to the Old and New Covenants 
is here summed up in these concluding verses. 
Just as He raised Christ from the dead, the God 
of the everlasting Covenant can and will now 
make you perfect in every good thing to do His 
will, working in you that which is well-pleasing 
in His sight through Jesus Christ. Your doing 
His will is the object of creation and redemption. 
God's working it all in you is what redemption 
has made possible. The Old Covenant of law 
and effort and failure has ended in condemnation 

76 



The Two Covenants: The Transition 

and death. The New Covenant is coming to 
give, in all whom the law has slain and brought 
to bow in their utter impotence, the law written 
in the heart, the Spirit dwelling there, and God 
working all, both to will and to do, through Jesus 
Christ. 

Oh for a Divine revelation that the transition 
from Christ's death, in its impotence, to His life 
in God's power, is the image, the pledge, the 
power of our transition out of the Old Covenant, 
when it has slain us, to the New, with God 
working in us all in all! 

The transition from Old to New, as effected in 
Christ, was sudden. Is it so in the believer? 
Not always. In us it depends upon a revelation. 
There have been cases in which a believer, sigh- 
ing and struggling against the yoke of bondage, 
has in one moment had it given to him to see 
what a complete salvation the New Covenant 
brings to the heart and the inner life, through 
the ministration of the Spirit, and by faith he has 
entered at once into his rest. There have been 
other cases in which, gradual as the dawn of 
day, the light of God has risen upon the heart. 
God's offer of entrance into the enjoyment of 
our New Covenant privileges is always urgent 

and immediate. Every believer is a child of the 

77 



The Two Covenants 

New Covenant, and heir of all its promises. The 
death of the Testator gives him full right to 
immediate possession. God longs to bring us 
into the land of promise; let us not come short 
through unbelief. 

May God reveal to us the difference between 
the two lives under the Old and the New; the 
resurrection power of the New, with God work- 
ing all in us ; the power of the transition secured 
to us in death with Christ and life in Him. And 
may He teach us at once to trust Christ Jesus for 
a full participation in all the New Covenant se- 
cures. 

There may be some one who can hardly believe 
that such a mighty change in his life is within his 
reach, and yet who would fain know what he is 
to do if there is to be any hope of his attaining 
it. I have just said, the death of the testator 
gives the heir immediate right to the inheritance. 
And, yet the heir, if he be a minor, does not enter 
on the possession. A term of years ends the 
stage of minority on earth, and he is no longer 
under guardians. In the spiritual life the state of 
pupilage ends, not with the expiry of years, but 
the moment the minor proves his fitness for be- 
ing made free from the law, by accepting the 

liberty there is in Christ Jesus. The transition, 

78 



The Two Covenants : The Transition 

as with the Old Testament, as with Christ, as 
with the disciples, comes when the time is ful- 
filled and all things are now ready. 

But what is one to do who is longing to be 
thus made ready ? Accept your death to sin in 
Christ, and act it out. Acknowledge the sen- 
tence of death on everything that is of nature: 
take and keep the place before God of utter un- 
worthiness and helplessness; sink down before 
Him in humility, meekness, patience, and resig- 
nation to His will and mercy. 1 Fix your heart 
upon the great and mighty God, who in His 
grace will work in you above what you can ask 
or think, and will make you a monument of His 
mercy. Believe that every blessing of the Cove- 
nant of grace is yours ; by the death of the Tes- 
tator you are entitled to it all — and on that faith 
act, knowing that all is yours. The new heart is 
yours, the law written in the heart is yours, the 
Holy Spirit, the seal of the Covenant, is yours. 
Act on the faith, and count upon God as Faithful 
and Able, and oh! so Loving, to reveal in you, to 
make true in you, all the power and glory of His 
everlasting Covenant. 

1 If you would understand the full meaning of this sentence and know 
how to practice its teaching, consult a little book just published, Dying to 
Self: A Golden Dialogue. By William Law, with Notes by Rev. Andrew 
Murray. 

79 



IX 

THE BLOOD OF THE COVENANT 

" Behold the blood of the covenant, which the 
Lord hath made with you." — Ex. xxiv. 8; Heb. 
ix. 20. 

" This cup is the new covenant in My blood." — 
1 Cor. xi. 25; Matt. xxvi. 28. 

' ' The blood of the covenant, wherewith he was 
sanctified." — Heb. x. 29. 

" The blood of the everlasting covenant." — Heb. 
xiii. 21. 

The blood is one of the strangest, the deepest, 
the mightiest, and the most heavenly of the 
thoughts of God. It lies at the very root of both 
Covenants, but specially of the New Covenant. 
The difference between the two Covenants is the 
difference between the blood of beasts, and the 
blood of the Lamb of God! The power of the 
New Covenant has no lesser measure than the 
worth of the blood of the Son of God! Your 
Christian experience ought to know of no stand- 
ard of peace with God, and purity from sin and 
power over the world, than the blood of Christ 

can give! If we would enter truly and fully into 

80 



The Blood of the Covenant 

all the New Covenant is meant to be to us, let us 
beseech God to reveal to us the worth and the 
power of the blood of the Covenant, the precious 
blood of Christ! 

The First Covenant was not brought in with- 
out blood. There could be no covenant of 
friendship between a holy God and sinful men 
without atonement and reconciliation; and no 
atonement without a death as the penalty of sin. 
God spake: "I have given you the blood upon 
the altar to make an atonement for your souls; 
for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for 
the soul. ,, The blood shed in death meant the 
death of a sacrifice slain for sin of man; the 
blood sprinkled on the altar meant that vicarious 
death accepted of God for the sinful one. No 
forgiveness, no covenant without bloodshed- 
ding. 

All this was but type and shadow of what was 
one day to become a mysterious reality. What 
no thought of man or angel could have con- 
ceived, what even now passeth all understand- 
ing, the Eternal Son of God took flesh and blood, 
and then shed that blood as the blood of the 
New Covenant, not merely to ratify it, but to 
open the way for it and to make it possible. 
Yea, more, to be, in time and eternity, the living 

81 



The Two Covenants 

power by which entrance into the Covenant was 
to be obtained, and all life in it be secured. 
Until we learn to form an expectation of a life in 
the New Covenant, according to the inconceiv- 
able worth and power of the blood of God's Son, 
we never can have even an insight into the en- 
tirely supernatural and heavenly life that a child 
of God may live. Let us think for a moment on 
the threefold light in which Scripture teaches us 
to regard it. 

In the passage from Hebrews ix. 15 we read: 
"For this cause Christ is the Mediator of a new 
covenant, that a death having taken place for the 
redemption of the transgressions that were under 
the first covenant, they that have been called may 
receive the promise of the eternal inheritance." 
The sins of the ages of the First Covenant, which 
had only figuratively been atoned for, had gath- 
ered up before God. A death was needed for 
the redemption of these. In that death and 
bloodshedding of the Lamb of God not only 
were these atoned for, but the power of all sin 
was forever broken. 

The blood of the New Covenant is redemption 
blood, a purchase price and ransom from the 
power of Sin and the Law. In any purchase 
made on earth the transference of property from 

82 



The Blood of the Covenant 

the old owner to the new is complete. Its worth 
may be ever so great and the hold on it ever so 
strong, if the price be paid, it is gone forever 
from him who owned it. The hold sin had on 
us was terrible. No thought can realize its legiti- 
mate claim on us under God's law, its awful ty- 
rant power in enslaving us. But the blood of 
God's Son has been paid. "Ye were redeemed, 
not with corruptible things as silver and gold, 
from your vain manner of life handed down 
from your fathers, but with precious blood, as of 
a lamb without spot, even the blood of Christ. ,, 
We have been rescued, ransomed, redeemed out 
of our old natural life, under the power of sin, 
utterly and eternally. Sin has not the slightest 
claim on us, nor the slightest power over us, ex- 
cept as our ignorance or unbelief or half-hearted- 
ness allows it to have dominion. Our New 
Covenant birthright is to stand in the freedom 
with which Christ has made us free. Until the 
soul sees, and accepts and desires, and claims the 
redemption and the liberty which has the blood 
of the Son of God for its purchase price, and its 
measure, and its security, it never can fully live 
the New Covenant life. 

As wonderful as the bloodshedding for our 
redemption is the blood-sprinkling for our cleans- 

83 



The Two Covenants 

ing. Here is indeed another of the spiritual 
mysteries of the New Covenant, which lose their 
power when understood in human wisdom, 
without the ministration of the Spirit of life. 
When Scripture speaks of ''having our hearts 
sprinkled from an evil conscience," of "the 
blood of Christ cleansing our conscience,'' of our 
singing here on earth (Rev. i. 5), "To Him that 
washed us from our sins in His blood," it brings 
this mighty, quickening blood of the Lamb into 
direct contact with our hearts. It gives the as- 
surance that that blood, in its infinite worth, in 
its Divine sin-cleansing power, can keep us 
clean in our walk in the sight and the light of 
God. It is as this blood of the New Covenant is 
known, and trusted, and waited for, and received 
from God, in its Divine mighty operation in the 
heart, that we shall begin to believe that the 
blessed promise of a New Covenant life and 
walk can be fulfilled. 

There is one more thing Scripture teaches con- 
cerning this blood of the New Covenant. When 
the Jews contrasted Moses with our Lord Jesus, 
He spake: "Except ye eat the flesh of the Son 
of man, and drink His blood, ye have not life in 
yourselves. He that eateth My flesh, and drinketh 
My blood, abideth in Me, and I in him." As if 

84 



The Blood of the Covenant 

the redeeming, and sprinkling, and washing, and 
sanctifying does not sufficiently express the in- 
tense inwardness of its action and its power to 
permeate our whole being, the drinking of this 
precious blood is declared to be indispensable to 
having life. If we would enter deep into the 
Spirit and power of the New Covenant, let us, 
by the Holy Spirit, drink deep of this cup — the 
cup of the New Covenant in His blood. 

On account of sin there could be no covenant 
between man and God without blood, and no 
New Covenant without the blood of the Son of 
God. As the cleansing away of sins was the 
first condition in making a covenant, so it is 
equally the first condition of an entrance into it. 
It has ever been found that a deeper appropriation 
of the blessings of the Covenant must be preceded 
by a new and deeper cleansing from sin. We 
know how in Ezekiel the words about God's 
causing us to walk in His statutes are preceded 
by " From all your filthiness -will I cleanse you." 
And then later we read (xxxvii. 23, 25), " Neither 
shall they defile themselves any more with any 
of their transgressions; / will cleanse them: so 
shall they be My people, and I will be their God. 
Moreover, I will make a Covenant of peace with 
them; it shall be an everlasting Covenant with 

85 



The Two Covenants 

them." The confession and casting away, and 
the cleansing away of sin in the blood, are the 
indispensable, but all-sufficient, preparation for a 
life in everlasting Covenant with God. 

Many feel that they do not understand or 
realize this wonderful power of the blood. 
Much thought does not help them; even prayer 
does not appear to bring the light they seek. 
The blood of Christ is a Divine mystery that 
passes all thought. Like every spiritual and 
heavenly blessing, this too, but this especially, 
needs to be imparted to us by the Holy Spirit. 
It was through the Eternal Spirit that Christ 
offered the sacrifice in which the blood was 
shed. The blood had the life of Christ, the life 
of the Spirit, in it. The outpouring of the blood 
for us was to prepare the way for the outpouring 
of the Spirit on us. It is the Holy Spirit, and He 
alone, who can minister the blood of the ever- 
lasting Covenant in power. Just as He leads the 
soul to the initial faith in the pardon that blood 
has purchased, and the peace it gives, He leads 
further to the knowledge and experience of its 
cleansing power. Here again, too, by faith — a 
faith in a heavenly power, of which it does not 
fully understand, nor cannot define, the action, 
but of which it knows that it is an operation of 

86 



The Blood of the Covenant 

God's mighty power, and effects a cleansing that 
does give a clean heart, — a clean heart, first known 
and accepted by the same faith, apart from signs 
or feelings, apart from sense or reason, and then 
experienced in the joy and the fellowship with 
God it brings. Oh! let us believe in the blood 
of the everlasting Covenant, and the cleansing 
the Holy Spirit ministers. Let us believe in the 
ministration of the Holy Spirit, until our whole 
life in the New Covenant becomes entirely His 
work, to the glory of the Father and of Christ. 

The blood of the Covenant, O mystery of 
mysteries! O grace above all grace! O mighty 
power of God, opening the way into the holiest, 
and into our hearts, and into the New Covenant, 
where the Holy One and our heart meets! Let 
us ask God much, by His Holy Spirit, to make us 
know what it is and works. 



87 



JESUS, THE MEDIATOR OF THE NEW COVENANT 

" I give thee for a covenant of the people." — Isa. 
xlii. 6, xlix. 8. 

" The Lord shall suddenly come to His temple, 
even the Messenger of the covenant, whom ye de- 
light in" — Mal. iii. i. 

''Jesus was made Surety of a better covenant" 
— Heb. vii. 22. 

" The Mediator of the Better Covenant, estab- 
lished upon better promises. . . . The Medi- 
ator of the New Covenant. . . . Ye are come 
to Jesus, the Mediator of the New Covenant." — 
Heb. viii. 6, ix. 15, xii. 24. 

We have here four titles given to our Lord 
Jesus in connection with the New Covenant. He 
is Himself called a Covenant. The union be- 
tween God and man, which the Covenant aims 
at, was wrought out in Him personally; in Him 
the reconciliation between the human and Divine 
was perfectly effected; in Him His people find 
the Covenant with all its blessings; He is all that 

God has to give, and is the assurance that it is 

88 



Jesus, the Mediator 

given. ... He is called the Messenger of 
the Covenant, because He came to establish and 
to proclaim it. . . . He is the Surety of the 
Covenant, not only because He paid our debt, but 
as He is Surety to us for God, that God will ful- 
fill His part; and Surety for us with God, that we 
will fulfill our part. . . . And He is Mediator 
of the Covenant, because as the Covenant was 
established in His atoning blood, is administered 
and applied by Him, is entered upon alone by 
faith in Him, so it is experimentally known only 
through the power of His resurrection life, and 
His never-ceasing intercession. All these names 
point to the one truth, that in the New Covenant 
Christ is all in all. 

The subject is so large that it would be impos- 
sible to enter upon all the various aspects of this 
precious truth. Christ's work in atonement and 
intercession, in His bestowal of pardon and the 
Holy Spirit, in His daily communication of grace 
and strength, are truths which lie at the very 
foundation of the faith of Christians. We need 
not speak of them here. What specially needs 
to be made clear to many is how, by faith in 
Christ as the Mediator of the New Covenant, we 
actually have access to and enter into the enjoy- 
ment of all its promised blessings. We have al- 

89 



The Two Covenants 

ready seen, in studying the New Covenant, how 
all these blessings culminate in the one thing — 
that the heart of man is to be put right, as the 
only possible way of his living in the favor of 
God, and God's love finding its satisfaction in 
him. That he is to receive a heart to fear God, 
to love God with all his strength, to obey God, 
and to keep all His statutes. All that Christ did 
and does has this for its aim ; all the higher bless- 
ings of peace and fellowship flow from this. In 
this God's saving power and love find the highest 
proof of their triumph over sin. Nothing so re- 
veals the grace of God, the power of Jesus Christ, 
the reality of salvation, the blessedness of the 
New Covenant, as the heart of a believer, where 
sin once abounded, with grace now abounding 
more exceedingly within it. 

I do not know how I can better set forth the 
glory of our Blessed Lord Jesus as He accom- 
plishes this, the real object of His redeeming 
work, and as He takes entire possession of the 
heart He has bought and won and washed as a 
dwelling for His Father, than by pointing out the 
place He takes, and the work He does, in the case 
of a soul who is being led out of the Old Cove- 
nant bondage with its failure, into the real ex- 
perience of the promise and power of the New 

90 



Jesus, the Mediator 

Covenant. 1 In thus studying the work of the 
Mediator in an individual, we may get a truer 
conception of the real glory and greatness of the 
work He actually accomplishes than when we 
only think of the work He has done for all. It is 
in the application of the redemption here in the 
life of earth, where sin abounded, that its power 
is seen. Let us see how the entrance into the 
New Covenant blessing is attained. 

The first step toward it in one who has been 
truly converted and assured of his acceptance 
with God is, the sense of sin. He sees that the 
New Covenant promises are not made true in his 
experience. There is not only indwelling sin, 
but he finds that he gives way to temper and 
self-will and worldliness, and other known trans- 
gressions of God's law. The obedience to which 
God calls and will fit him, the life of abiding in 
Christ's love which is his privilege, the power 
for a holy walk, well-pleasing to God, — in all 
this his conscience condemns him. It is in this 
conviction of sin that any thought or desire of 
the full New Covenant blessing must have its 
rise. Where the thought that obedience is an 
impossibility, and that nothing but a life of fail- 
ure and self-condemnation is to be looked for, 

1 For a practical illustration in the life of Canon Battersby, see Note D. 
91 



The Two Covenants 

has wrought a secret despair of deliverance, or 
contentment with our present state, it is vain to 
speak of God's promise or power. The heart 
does not respond: it knows well enough, it is 
sure, the liberty spoken of is a dream. But 
where the dissatisfaction with our state has 
wrought a longing for something better, the 
heart is open to receive the message. 

The New Covenant is meant to be the deliver- 
ance from the power of sin; a keen longing for 
this is the indispensable preparation for entering 
fully into the Covenant. 

Now comes the second step. As the mind is 
directed to the literal meaning of the terms of the 
New Covenant, in its promises of cleansing from 
sin, and a heart filled with God's fear and God's 
law, and a power to keep God's commands and 
never to depart from Him; as the eye is fixed 
on Jesus the Surety of the Covenant, who will 
Himself make it all true; and as the voice is 
heard of witnesses who can declare how, after 
years of bondage, all this has been fulfilled in 
them — the longing begins to grow into a hope, 
and the inquiry is made, as to what is needed to 
enter this blessed life. 

Then follows another step. The heart-search- 
ing question comes whether we are willing to 

92 



Jesus, the Mediator 

give up every evil habit, all our own self-will, 
all that is of the spirit of the world, and sur- 
render ourselves to be wholly and exclusively 
for Jesus. God cannot take so complete pos- 
session of a man, and bless him so wonderfully, 
and work in him so mightily, unless He has him 
very completely, yea, wholly for Himself. Happy 
the man who is ready for any sacrifice. _J 

Now comes the last, the simplest, and yet 
often the most difficult step. And here it is we 
need to know Jesus as Mediator of the Covenant. 
As we hear of the life of holiness and obedience 
and victory over sin which the Covenant prom- 
ises, and hear that it will be to us according to 
our faith, so that if we claim it in faith it will 
surely be ours, the heart often fails for fear. I 
am willing, but have I the power to make, and 
what is more, to maintain this full surrender? 
Have I the power, the strong faith, so to grasp 
and hold this offered blessing that it shall indeed 
be and continue mine ? How such questions 
perplex the soul until it finds the answer to them 
in the one word: Jesus! // is He who will be- 
stow the power to make the surrender and to 
believe. This is as surely and as exclusively His 
work, as atonement and intercession are His 
alone. As sure as it was His to win and ascend 

93 



The Two Covenants 

the throne, it is His to prove His dominion in the 
individual soul. It is He, the Living One, who is 
in Divine power to work and maintain the life of 
communion and victory within us. He is the 
Mediator and Surety of the Covenant — He, the 
God-man, who has undertaken not only for all 
that God requires, but for all that we need too. 

When this is seen, the believer learns that 
here, just as at conversion, it is all of faith. The 
one thing needed now is, with the eye definitely 
fixed on some promise of the New Covenant, to 
turn from self and anything it could or need do, 
to let go self, and fall into the arms of Jesus. 
He is the Mediator of the New Covenant: it is 
His to lead us into it. In the assurance that 
Jesus, and every New Covenant blessing, is 
already ours in virtue of our being God's chil- 
dren; with the desire now to appropriate and 
enjoy what we have hitherto allowed to lie 
unused ; in the faith that Jesus now gives us the 
needed strength in faith to claim and accept our 
heritage as a present possession ; the will dares 
boldly to do the deed, and to take the heavenly 
gift — a life in Christ according to the better 
promises. By faith in Jesus you have seen and 
received Him as to you, in full truth, the Medi- 
ator of the New Covenant, both in heaven 

94 



Jesus, the Mediator 

and in your heart. He is the Mediator who 
makes it true between God and you, as your 
experience. 

The fear has sometimes been expressed that, if 
we press so urgently the work that Christ through 
the Spirit does in the heart, we may be drawn off 
from trusting in what He has done and ever is 
doing, to what we are experiencing of its work- 
ing. The answer is simple. It is with the heart 
alone that Christ can be truly known or hon- 
ored. It is in the heart the work of grace is to 
be done, and the saving power of Christ to be 
displayed. It is in the heart alone the Holy 
Spirit has His sphere of work; there He is to 
work Christ's likeness ; it is there alone He can 
glorify Christ. The Spirit can only glorify Christ 
by revealing His saving power in us. If we were 
to speak of what we are to do in cleansing our 
heart and keeping it right, the fear would be 
well-grounded. But the New Covenant calls us 
to the very opposite. What it tells us of the 
Atonement, and the Righteousness of God it has 
won for us, will be our only glory even amid the 
highest holiness of heaven: Christ's work of 
holiness here in the heart can only deepen the 
consciousness of that Righteousness as our only 
plea. The sanctification of the Spirit, as the 

95 



The Two Covenants 

fulfillment of the New Covenant promises, is all 
a taking of the things of Christ and revealing and 
imparting it to us. The deeper our entrance into 
and our possession of the New Covenant gift of 
a new heart, the fuller will be our knowledge 
and our love of Him who is its Mediator; the 
more we shall glory in Him alone. The Cove- 
nant deals with the heart, just that Christ may be 
found there, may dwell there by faith. As we 
look at the heart, not in the light of feeling or 
experience, but in the light of the faith of God's 
Covenant, we shall learn to think and speak of it 
as God does, and begin to know what it is, that 
there Christ manifests Himself and there He and 
the Father come to make their abode. 



96 



XI 

JESUS, THE SURETY OF A BETTER COVENANT 

" And inasmuch as it is not without the taking 
of an oath : by so much also hath Jesus become 
the Surety of a better covenant. Wherefore also 
He is able to save completely them that draw near 
unto God through Him, seeing He ever liveth to 
make intercession for them." — Heb. vii. 20, 22, 25. 

A surety is one who stands good for another, 
that a certain engagement will be faithfully per- 
formed. Jesus is the Surety of the New Cove- 
nant. He stands surety with us for God — that 
God's part in the Covenant will faithfully be per- 
formed. And He stands surety with God for us, 
that our part will be faithfully performed too. 
If we are to live in covenant with God, every- 
thing depends upon our knowing aright what 
Jesus secures to us. The more we know and 
trust Him, the more assured will our faith be 
that its every promise and every demand will be 
fulfilled, that a life of faithful keeping of God's 
Covenant is indeed possible, because Jesus is the 
Surety of the Covenant. He makes God's faith- 
fulness and ours equally sure. 

97 



The Two Covenants 

We read that it was because His priesthood 
was confirmed by the oath of God, that He be- 
came the Surety of a so much better Covenant. 
The oath of God gives us the security that His 
suretyship will secure all the better promises. 
The meaning and infinite value of God's oath 
had been explained in the previous chapter. "In 
every dispute the oath is final for confirmation. 
Wherein God, being minded to show more abun- 
dantly unto the heirs of the promise the immu- 
tability of His counsel, interposed with an oath, 
that by two immutable things, in which it is 
impossible for God to lie, we may have a strong 
encouragement." We thus have not only a Cove- 
nant, with certain definite promises; we have 
not only Jesus the Surety of the Covenant; but 
at the back of that again, we have the living 
God, with a view to our having perfect confi- 
dence in the unchangeableness of His counsel 
and promise, coming in between with an oath. 
Do we not begin to see that the one thing God 
aims at in this Covenant, and asks with regard 
to it, is an absolute confidence that He is going 
to do all He has promised, however difficult or 
wonderful it may appear ? His oath is an end of 
all fear or doubt. Let no one think of under- 
standing the Covenant, of judging or saying 

98 



The Surety of the Better Covenant 

what may be expected from it, much less of ex- 
periencing its blessings, until he meets God with 
an Abraham-like faith, that gives Him the glory, 
and is fully assured that what He has promised 
He is able to perform. The Covenant is a sealed 
mystery, except to the soul who is going with- 
out reserve to trust God, and abandon itself to 
His word and work. 

Of the work of Christ, as the Surety of the 
better Covenant, our passage tells us that, be- 
cause of this priesthood confirmed by oath, He 
is able to save completely those who draw near 
to God through Him. And this, because "He 
ever liveth to make intercession forthem. ,, As 
Surety of the Covenant, He is ceaselessly en- 
gaged in watching their needs, and presenting 
them to the Father, in receiving His answer, and 
imparting its blessing. It is because of this 
never-ceasing mediation, receiving and trans- 
mitting from God to us the gifts and powers of 
the heavenly world, that He is able to save com- 
pletely — to work and maintain in us a salvation 
as complete as God is willing it should be, as 
complete as the Better Covenant has assured us 
it shall be in the better promises upon which it 
was established. These promises are expounded 

(ch. viii. 7-15) as being none other than those of 

99 



The Two Covenants 

the New Covenant of Jeremiah, with the law 
written in the heart by the Spirit of God as our 
experience of the power of that salvation. 

Jesus, the Surety of a better Covenant, Jesus 
is to be our assurance that everything connected 
with the Covenant is unchangeably and eternally 
sure. In Jesus the keynote is given of all our 
intercourse with God, of all our prayers and de- 
sires, of all our life and walk, that with full as- 
surance of faith and hope we may look for every 
word of the Covenant to be made fully true to us 
by God's own power. Let us look at some of 
these things of which we are to be fully assured, 
if we are to breathe the spirit of children of the 
New Covenant. 

There is the love of God. The very thought 
of a Covenant is an alliance of friendship. And 
it is as a means of assuring us of His love, of 
drawing us close to His heart of love, of getting 
our hearts under the power of His love, and 
filled with it — it is because God loves us with an 
infinite love, and wants us to know it, and to 
give it complete liberty to bestow itself on us, 
and bless us, that the New Covenant has been 
made, and God's own Son been made its Surety. 
This love of God is an infinite Divine energy, 
doing its utmost to fill the soul with itself and 

100 



The Surety of the Better Covenant 

its blessedness. Of this love God's Son is the 
Messenger; of the Covenant in which God re- 
veals it to us He is the Surety; let us learn that 
the chief need in studying the Covenant and 
keeping it, in seeking and claiming its blessings, 
is the exercise of a strong and confident assur- 
ance in God's love. 

Then there is the assurance of the sufficiency 
of Christ's finished redemption. All that was 
needed to put av/ay sin, to free us entirely and 
forever from its power, has been accomplished 
by Christ. His blood and death, His resurrection 
and ascension, have taken us out of the power 
of the world and transplanted us into a new life 
in the power of the heavenly world. All this 
is Divine reality; Christ is Surety that the Divine 
righteousness, and the Divine acceptance, that 
all-sufficient Divine grace and strength, are ever 
ours. He is Surety that all these can and will be 
communicated to us in unbroken continuance. 

It is even so with the assurance of what is 
needed on our part to enter into this life in the 
New Covenant: we shrink back, either from the 
surrender of all, because we know not whether 
we have the power to let it go, or from the faith, 
because we fear ours will never be so strong or 
so bold as to take and hold all that is offered us 

101 



The Two Covenants 

in this wonderful Covenant. Jesus is Surety of 
a better Covenant. The better consists just in 
this very thing, that it undertakes to provide the 
children of the Covenant with the very dispo- 
sitions they need, to accept and enjoy it. We 
have seen how the heart is just the central ob- 
ject of the Covenant promise. A heart circum- 
cised to love God with all the heart a heart into 
which God's law and fear have been put, so that 
it will not depart from Him — it is of all this 
Jesus is the Surety under the oath of God. Let 
us say it once more: Surely the one thing God 
asks of us, and has given the Covenant and its 
Surety to secure — the confident trust that all will 
be done in us that is needed — is what we dare 
not withhold. 

I think some of us are beginning to see what 
has been our great mistake. We have thought 
and spoken great things of what Christ did on 
the Cross, and does on the Throne, as Covenant 
Surety. And we have stopped there. But we 
have not expected Him to do great things in our 
hearts. And yet it is there, in our heart, that the 
consummation takes place of the work on the 
Cross and the Throne; in the heart the New 
Covenant has its full triumph; the Surety is to 
be known not by what the mind can think of 

102 



The Surety of the Better Covenant 

Him in heaven, but by what He does to make 
Himself known in the heart. There is the place 
where His love triumphs and is enthroned. Let 
us with the heart believe and receive Him as the 
Covenant Surety. Let us, with every desire we 
entertain in connection with it, with every duty 
it calls us to, with every promise it holds out, 
look to Jesus, under God's oath the Surety of the 
Covenant. Let us believe that by the Holy Spirit 
the heart is His home and His throne. Let us, if 
we have not done it yet, in a definite act of faith, 
throw ourselves utterly on Him, for the whole of 
the New Covenant life and walk. No surety 
was ever so faithful to his undertaking as Jesus 
will be to His on our behalf, in our hearts. 

And now, notwithstanding the strong confi- 
dence and consolation the oath of God and the 
Surety of the Covenant gives, there are some still 
looking wistfully at this blessed life, and yet 
afraid to trust themselves to this wondrous grace. 
They have a conception of faith as something 
great and mighty, and they know and feel that 
theirs is not such. And so their feebleness re- 
mains an insuperable barrier to their inheriting 
the promise. Let me try and say once again: 
Brother, the act of faith, by which you accept 
and enter this life in the New Covenant, is not 

103 



The Two Covenants 

commonly an act of power, but often of weak- 
ness and fear and much trembling. And even in 
the midst of all this feebleness, it is not an act in 
your strength, but in a secret and perhaps unfelt 
strength, which Jesus the Surety of the Covenant 
gives you. God has made Him Surety, with the 
very object of inspiring us with courage and con- 
fidence. He longs, He delights to bring you into 
the Covenant. Why not bow before Him, and 
say meekly: He does hear prayer; He brings 
into the Covenant; He enables a soul to believe; 
I may trust Him confidently. And just begin 
quietly to believe that there is an Almighty Lord, 
given by the Father, to do everything needed to 
make all Covenant grace wholly true in you. 
Bow low, and look up out of your low estate to 
your glorified Lord, and maintain your confidence 
that a soul, that in its nothingness trusts in Him, 
will receive more than it can ask or think. 

Dear believer, come and be a believer. Believe 
that God is showing you how entirely the Lord 
Jesus wants to have you and your life for Him- 
self; how entirely He is willing to take charge of 
you and work all in you; how entirely you may 
even now commit your trust, and your surrender, 
and your faithfulness to the Covenant, with all 

you are and are to be, to Him, your Blessed 

104 



The Surety of the Better Covenant 

Surety. If thou believest, thou shalt see the 
glory of God. 

In a sense, and measure, and power that 
passeth knowledge, Jesus Christ is Himself all 
that God can either ask or give, all that God 
wants to see in us. "He that believeth in Me, 
out of him shall flow rivers of living water." 



105 



XII 

THE BOOK OF THE COVENANT 

<( And Moses took the book of the covenant, 
and read in the audience of the people : and they 
said, All that the Lord hath said will we do and 
be obedient. And Moses took the blood, and 
sprinkled it on the people, and said, Behold the 
blood of the covenant, which the Lord hath made 
with you concerning all these words." — Ex. xxiv. 
7, 8; comp. HEb. ix. 18-20. 

Here is a new aspect in which to regard God's 

blessed Book. Before Moses sprinkled the blood, 

he read the Book of the Covenant, and obtained 

the people's acceptance of it. And when he had 

sprinkled it, he said, " Behold the blood of the 

covenant, which the Lord hath made concerning 

all these words." The Book contained all the 

conditions of the Covenant; only through the 

Book could they know all that God asked of 

them, and all that they might ask of Him. Let 

us consider what new light may be thrown both 

upon the Covenant and upon the Book, by the 

one thought that the Bible is the Book of the 

Covenant. 

106 



The Book of the Covenant 

The very first thought suggested will be this, 
that in nothing will the spirit of our life and ex- 
perience, as it lives either in the Old or the New 
Covenant, be more manifest than in our dealings 
with the Book. The Old had a book as well as 
the New. Our Bible contains both. The New 
was enfolded in the Old; the Old is unfolded in 
the New. It is possible to read the Old in the 
spirit of the New; it is possible to read the New 
as well as the Old in the spirit of the Old. 

What this spirit of the Old is, we cannot see 
so clearly anywhere as just in Israel when the 
Covenant was made. They were at once ready 
to promise: "All that the Lord hath said will 
we do and be obedient." There was so little 
sense of their own sinfulness, or of the holiness 
and glory of God, that with perfect self-confi- 
dence they considered themselves able to under- 
take to keep the Covenant. They understood 
little of the meaning of that blood with which 
they were sprinkled, or of that death and re- 
demption of which it was the symbol. In their 
own strength, in the power of the flesh, they 
were ready to undertake to serve God. It is just 
the spirit in which many Christians regard the 
Bible. It is a system of laws, a course of in- 
struction to direct us in the way God would have 

107 



The Two Covenants 

us go. All He asks of us is, that we should do 
our utmost in seeking to fulfill them; more we 
cannot do; this we are sincerely ready to do. 
They know little or nothing of what the death 
means through which the Covenant is estab- 
lished, or what the life from the dead is through 
which alone a man can walk in covenant with 
the God of heaven. 

This self-confident spirit in Israel is explained 
by what had happened just previously. When 
God had come down on Mount Sinai in thunder- 
ings and lightnings to give the law, they were 
greatly afraid. They said to Moses: "Let not 
God speak with us, lest we die; speak thou with 
us, and we will hear/' They thought it was 
simply a matter of hearing and knowing; they 
could for certain obey. They knew not that it 
is only the presence, and the fear, and the near- 
ness, and the power of God humbling us and 
making us afraid, that can conquer the power of 
sin and give the power to obey. It is so much 
easier to receive the instruction from man, and 
live, than to wait and hear the voice of God, and 
die to all our own strength and goodness. It is 
no otherwise that many Christians seek to serve 
God without ever seeking to live in daily contact 
with Him, and without the faith that it is only 

108 



The Book of the Covenant 

His presence can keep from sin. Their religion 
is a matter of outward instruction from man : the 
waiting to hear God's voice that they may obey 
Him, the death to the flesh and the world that 
comes with a close walk with God, are unknown. 
They may be faithful and diligent in the study of 
their Bible, in reading or hearing Bible teaching; 
to have as much as possible of that intercourse 
with the Covenant God Himself which makes 
the Christian life possible — this they do not seek. 
If you would be delivered from all this, learn 
ever to read the Book of the New Covenant in 
the New Covenant Spirit. One of the very first 
articles of the New Covenant has reference to 
this matter. When God says, I will put My law 
in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts, 
He engages that the words of His Holy Book 
shall no longer be mere outward teaching, but 
that what they command shall be our very dis- 
position and delight, wrought in us as a birth 
and a life by the Holy Spirit. Every word of the 
New Covenant then becomes a Divine assurance 
of what may be obtained by the Holy Spirit's 
working. The soul learns to see that the letter 
killeth, that the flesh profiteth nothing. The 
study, and knowledge of, the delight in, Bible 
words and thoughts, cannot profit, except as the 

109 



The Two Covenants 

Holy Spirit is waited on to make them life. The 
acceptance of Holy Scripture in the letter, in the 
human understanding and reception of it, is seen 
to be as fruitless as was Israel's at Sinai. But as 
the Word of God, spoken by the Living God 
through the Spirit into the heart that waits on 
Him, it is found to be quick and powerful. It 
then is a word that worketh effectually in them 
that believe, giving within the heart the actual 
possession of the very grace of which the Word 
has spoken. 

The New Covenant is a ministration of the 
Spirit (see Chap. VII.)- All its teaching is meant 
to be teaching by the Holy Spirit. The two most 
remarkable chapters in the Bible on the preach- 
ing of the gospel are those in which Paul ex- 
pounds the secret of his teaching (i Cor. ii. ; 2 
Cor. iii.). Every minister ought to see whether 
he can pass his examination in them. They tell 
us that in the New Covenant the Holy Spirit is 
everything. It was the Holy Spirit entering the 
heart, writing, revealing, impressing upon it 
God's law and truth, that could work true obe- 
dience. No excellency of speech or human wis- 
dom can in the least profit: God must reveal by 
His Holy Spirit to preacher and hearer the things 

He hath prepared for us. What is true of the 

110 



The Book of the Covenant 

preacher is equally true of the hearer. One of 
the great reasons that so many Christians never 
come out of the Old Covenant, never even know 
that they are in it, and have to come out of it, is 
that there is so much head knowledge, without 
the power of the Spirit in the heart being waited 
for. It is only when preachers and hearers and 
readers believe that the Book of the New Cove- 
nant needs the Spirit of the New Covenant, to 
explain and apply it, that the Word of God can 
do its work. 

Learn the double lesson. What God hath 
joined together, let no man put asunder. The 
Bible is the Book of the New Covenant. And 
the Holy Spirit is the only minister of what be- 
longs to the Covenant. Expect not to under- 
stand or profit by thy Bible knowledge without 
seeking continually the teaching of the Holy 
Spirit. Beware lest thy earnest Bible study, thy 
excellent books, or thy beloved teachers take the 
place of the Holy Spirit! Pray daily, and perse- 
veringly, and believingly for His teaching. He 
will write the Word in thy heart. 

The Bible is the Book of the New Covenant. 

Ask the Holy Spirit specially to reveal to thee the 

New Covenant in it. It is inconceivable what 

loss the Church of our day is suffering because so 

ill 



The Two Covenants 

few believers truly live as its heirs, in the true 
knowledge and enjoyment of its promises. Ask 
God, in humble faith, to give thee in all thy Bible 
reading, the spirit of wisdom and revelation, en- 
lightened eyes of thine heart, to know what the 
promises are which the Covenant reveals; and 
what the Divine security in Jesus, the Surety of 
the Covenant, that every promise will be fulfilled 
in thee in Divine power; and what the intimate 
fellowship to which it admits thee with the God 
of the Covenant. The ministration of the Spirit, 
humbly waited for and listened to, will make the 
Book of the Covenant shine with new light — 
even the light of God's countenance and a full 
salvation. 

All this applies specially to the knowledge of 
what actually the New Covenant is meant to 
work. Amid all we hear, and read, and under- 
stand of the different promises of the New Cove- 
nant, it is quite possible that we never yet have 
had that heavenly vision of it as a whole, that 
with its overmastering power compels accept- 
ance. Just hear once again what it really is. 
The obedience and fellowship with God, for 
which man was created, which sin broke off, 
which the law demanded, but could not work, 
which God's own Son came from heaven to 

112 



The Book of the Covenant 

restore in our lives, is now brought within our 
reach and offered us. Our Father tells us in the 
Book of the New Covenant that He now expects 
us to live in full and unbroken obedience and 
communion with Him. He tells us that by the 
mighty power of His Son and Spirit He Himself 
will work this in us: everything has been ar- 
ranged for it. He tells us that such a life of un- 
broken obedience is possible because Christ, as 
the Mediator, will live in us and enable us each 
moment to live in Him. He tells us that all He 
wants is simply the surrender of faith, the yield- 
ing ourselves to Him to do His work. Oh! let 
us look, and see this holy life, with all its powers 
and blessings, coming down from God in heaven, 
in the Son and His Spirit. Let us believe that 
the Holy Spirit can give us a vision of it, as a 
prepared Gift, to be bestowed in living power, 
and take possession of us. Let us look upward 
and look inward, in the faith of the Son and the 
Spirit, and God will show us that every word 
written in the Book of the Covenant is not only 
true, but that it can be made spirit and truth 
within us, and in our daily life. This can in- 
deed be. 



113 






XIII 

NEW COVENANT OBEDIENCE 

' ' Now therefore, if ye will obey My voice in- 
deed, and keep My covenant, then ye shall be a 
holy nation unto Me" — Ex. xix. 5. 

4 ' And the Lord thy God will circumcise thine 
heart, and the heart of thy seed, to love the Lord 
thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul. 
And thou shalt obey the voice of the Lord, and do 
all His commandments" — Deut. xxx. 6, 8. 

44 And I will put My Spirit within you, and 
cause you to walk in My statutes, and ye shall 
keep My judgments." — Ezek. xxxvi. 27. 

In making the New Covenant, God said very 
definitely, "Not after the covenant I made with 
your fathers." We have learned what the fault 
was with that Covenant: it made God's favor 
dependent upon the obedience of the people. 
44 If ye obey, I will be your God." We have 
learned how the New Covenant remedied the de- 
fect: God Himself provided for the obedience. 
It changes " If ye keep My judgments" into "I 
will put My Spirit within you, and ye shall keep" 
Instead of the Covenant and its fulfillment de- 
pending on man's obedience, God undertakes to 

114 



New Covenant Obedience 

ensure the obedience. The Old Covenant proved 
the need, and pointed out the path, of holiness: 
the New inspires the love, and gives the power, 
of holiness. 

In connection with this change, a serious and 
most dangerous mistake is often made. Because 
in the New Covenant obedience no longer occu- 
pies the place it had in the Old, as the condition 
of the Covenant, and free grace has taken its 
place, justifying the ungodly, and bestowing 
gifts on the rebellious, many are under the im- 
pression that obedience is now no longer as in- 
dispensable as it was then. The error is a terrible 
one. The whole Old Covenant was meant to 
teach the lesson of the absolute and indispen- 
sable necessity of obedience for a life in God's 
favor. The New Covenant comes, not to pro- 
vide a substitute for that obedience in faith, but 
through faith to secure the obedience, by giving 
a heart that delights in it and has the power for 
it. And men abuse the free grace, that without 
our own obedience accepts us for a life of new 
obedience, when they rest content with the 
grace, without the obedience it is meant for. 
They boast of the higher privileges of the New 
Covenant, while its chief blessing, the power of 
a holy life, a heart delighting in God's law, and 

115 



The Two Covenants 

a life in which God causes and enables us, by His 
indwelling Spirit, to keep His commandments, 
is neglected. If there is one thing we need to 
know well, it is the place obedience takes in the 
New Covenant. 

Let our first thought be: Obedience is essential. 
At the very root of the relation of a creature to 
his God, and of God admitting the creature to 
His fellowship, lies the thought of obedience. 
It is the one only thing God spoke of in Paradise 
when "the Lord God commanded the man" not 
to eat of the forbidden fruit. In Christ's great 
salvation it is the power that redeemed us: "By 
the obedience of one shall many be made right- 
eous." In the promise of the New Covenant it 
takes the first place. God engages to circum- 
cise the hearts of His people — in the putting off 
of the body of the flesh, in the circumcision of 
Christ — to love God with all their heart, and to 
obey His commandments. The crowning gift 
of Christ's exaltation was the Holy Ghost to 
bring salvation to us as an inward thing. The 
first Covenant demanded obedience, and failed 
because it could not find it. The New Covenant 
was expressly made to provide for obedience. To 
a life in the full enjoyment of the New Covenant 
blessing, obedience is essential. 

116 



New Covenant Obedience 

It is this indispensable necessity of obedience 
that explains why so often the entrance into the 
full enjoyment of the New Covenant has de- 
pended upon some single act of surrender. 
There was something in the life, some evil or 
doubtful habit, in regard to which conscience 
had often said that it was not in perfect accord 
with God's perfect will. Attempts were made 
to push aside the troublesome suggestion. Or 
unbelief said it would be impossible to overcome 
the habit, and maintain the promise of obedience 
to the Voice within. Meantime, all our prayer 
appeared of no avail. It was as if faith could 
not lay hold of the blessing which was full in 
sight, until at last the soul consented to regard 
this little thing as the test of its surrender to obey 
in everything, and of its faith that in everything 
the Surety of the Covenant would give power to 
maintain the obedience. With the evil or doubt- 
ful thing given up, with a good conscience re- 
stored, and the heart's confidence before God as- 
sured, the soul could receive and possess what it 
sought. Obedience is essential. 

Obedience is possible. The thought of a de- 
mand which man cannot possibly render, cuts at 
the very root of true hope and strength. The 
secret thought, "No man can obey God," throws 

117 



The Two Covenants 

thousands back into the Old Covenant life, and 
into a false peace that God does not expect more 
than that we do our best. Obedience is possible: 
the whole New Covenant promises and secures 
this. 

Only understand aright what obedience means. 
The renewed man has still the flesh, with its evil 
nature, out of which there arise involuntary evil 
thoughts and dispositions. These may be found 
in a truly obedient man. Obedience deals with 
the doing of what is known to be God's will, as 
taught by the Word, and the Holy Spirit, and 
conscience. When George Muller spoke of the 
great happiness he had had for more than sixty 
years in God's service, he attributed it to two 
things — He had loved God's Word, and " he had 
maintained a good conscience, not willfully going 
on in a course he knew to be contrary to the 
mind of God." When the full light of God 
broke in upon Gerhard Tersteegen, he wrote: 
"I promise, with Thy help and power, rather to 
give up the last drop of my blood, than know- 
ingly and willingly in my heart or my life be 
untrue and disobedient to Thee." Such obedi- 
ence is an attainable degree of grace. 

Obedience is possible. When the law is writ- 
ten in the heart; when the heart is circumcised to 

118 



New Covenant Obedience 

love the Lord with all our heart, and to obey 
Him; when the love of God is shed abroad in the 
heart; it means that the love of God's law and of 
Himself has now become the moving power of 
our life. This love is no vague sentiment, in 
man's imagination of something that exists in 
heaven, but a living, mighty power of God in 
the heart, working effectually according to His 
working, which worketh in us mightily. A life 
of obedience is possible. 

This obedience is of faith. "By faith Abra- 
ham obeyed." By faith the promises of the 
Covenant, the presence of the Surety of the 
Covenant, the hidden inworking of the Holy 
Spirit, and the love of God in His infinite desire 
and power to make true in us all His love and 
promises, must live in us. Faith can bring them 
nigh, and make us live in the very midst of them. 
Christ and His wonderful redemption need not 
remain at a distance from us in heaven, but can 
become our continual experience. However cold 
or feeble we may feel, faith knows that the new 
heart is in us, that the love of God's law is our 
very nature, that the teaching and power of the 
Spirit are within us. Such faith knows it can 
obey. Let us hear the voice of our Saviour, the 
Surety of the Covenant, as He says, with a 

119 



The Two Covenants 

deeper, fuller meaning than when He was on 
earth: "Only believe. If thou canst believe, 
all things are possible to him that believeth. ,, 

And last of all, let us understand: Obedience 
is a joy and a delight Do not regard it only as 
the way to the joy and blessings of the New 
Covenant, but as itself, in its very nature, part of 
that blessedness. To have the voice of God 
teaching and guiding you, to be united to God in 
willing what He wills, in working out what He 
works in you by His Spirit, in doing His Holy 
Will, and pleasing Him, — surely all this is joy 
unspeakable and full of glory. 

To a healthy man it is a delight to walk or 
work, to put forth his strength and conquer diffi- 
culties. To a slave or a hireling it is bondage 
and weariness. The Old Covenant demanded 
obedience with an inexorable must, and the threat 
that followed it. The New Covenant changes 
the must to can and may. Do ask God, by the 
Holy Spirit, to show you how "you have been 
created in Christ Jesus unto good works," and 
how, as fitted as a vine is for bearing grapes, 
your new nature is perfectly prepared for every 
good work. Ask Him to show you that He 
means obedience, not only to be a possible thing, 
but the most delightful and attractive gift He has 

120 



New Covenant Obedience 

to bestow, the entrance into His love and all its 
blessedness. 

In the New Covenant the chief thing is not the 
wonderful treasure of strength and grace it con- 
tains, nor the Divine security that that treasure 
never can fail, but this, that the living God gives 
Himself, and makes Himself known, and takes 
possession of us as our God. For this man was 
created, for this He was redeemed again, for this, 
that it may be our actual experience, the Holy 
Spirit has been given and is dwelling in us. Be- 
tween what God has already wrought in us, and 
what He waits to work, obedience is the blessed 
link. Let us seek to walk before Him in the con- 
sciousness that we are of those who live in the 
noble and holy consciousness: my one work is 
to obey God. 1 

What can be the reason, I ask once again, that 
so many believers have seen so little of the beauty 
of this New Covenant life, with its power of 
holy and joyful obedience? "Their eyes were 
holden that they knew Him not." The Lord was 
with the disciples, but their hearts were blind. 
It is so still. It is as with Elisha's servant, all 
heaven is around him and he knows it not. 



'In a volume just published, The School of Obedience^ the thoughts of 
this chapter are more fully worked out. 

121 



The Two Covenants 

Nothing will help but the prayer, "Lord, open 
his eyes, that he may see." Lord, is there not 
some one who may be reading this, who just 
needs one touch to see it all? Oh! give that 
touch! 

Just listen, my brother. Thy Father loves thee 
with an infinite love, and longs to make thee, 
even to-day, His holy, happy, obedient child. 
Hear His message: He has for thee an entirely 
different life from what thou art living. A life 
in which His grace shall actually work in thee 
every moment all He asks thee to be. A life of 
simple childlike obedience, doing for the day just 
what the Father shows thee to be His will. A 
life in which the abiding love of thy Father, and 
the abiding presence of thy Saviour, and the joy 
of the Holy Spirit, can keep thee, and make thee 
glad and strong. 

This is His message. This life is for thee. 
Fear not to accept this life, to give up thyself to 
it and its entire obedience. In Christ it is pos- 
sible, it is sure. 

Now, my brother, just turn heavenward and 
ask the Father, by the Holy Spirit, to show thee 
the beautiful heavenly life. Ask and expect it. 
Keep thine eyes fixed upon it. The great bless- 
ing of the New Covenant is obedience ; the won- 

122 



New Covenant Obedience 

derful poller to will and to do as God wills. It 
is indeed the entrance to every other blessing. It 
is paradise restored and heaven opened — the crea- 
ture honoring his Creator, the Creator delighting 
in His creature; the child glorifying the Father, 
the Father glorifying the child, as He changes 
him, from glory to glory, into the likeness of His 
Son. 



123 



XIV 

THE NEW COVENANT: A COVENANT OF GRACE 

" Sin shall not have dominion over you : for ye 
are not under the law, but under grace ." — Rom. 
vi. 14. 

The words, Covenant of grace, though not 
found in Scripture, are the correct expression of 
the truth it abundantly teaches, that the contrast 
between the two covenants is none other than 
that of law and grace. Of the New Covenant, 
grace is the great characteristic: " The law came 
in, that the offence might abound; but where sin 
abounded, grace did abound more exceedingly." 
It is to bring the Romans away entirely from 
under the Old Covenant, and to teach them their 
place in the New, that Paul writes: " Ye are not 
under the law, but under grace." And he assures 
them that if they believe this, and live in it, their 
experience would confirm God's promise: "Sin 
shall not have dominion over you." What the 
law could not do — give deliverance from the 
power of sin over us — grace would effect. The 
New Covenant was entirely a Covenant of grace. 

124 



A Covenant of Grace 

In the wonderful grace of God it had its origin; 
it was meant to be a manifestation of the riches 
and the glory of that grace; of grace, and by 
grace working in us, all its promises can be ful- 
filled and experienced. 

The word grace is used in two senses. It is 
first the gracious disposition in God which moves 
Him to love us freely without our merit, and to 
bestow all His blessings upon us. Then it also 
means that power which this grace bestows upon 
us to work in us. The redeeming work of Christ, 
and the righteousness He won for us, equally 
with the work of the Spirit in us, as the power 
of the new life, are spoken of as Grace. It in- 
cludes all that Christ has done and still does, all 
He has and gives, all He is for us and in us. 
John says, "We beheld His glory, the glory of 
the Only Begotten of the Father, full of grace 
and truth." "The law was given by Moses; 
grace and truth came by Jesus Christ." "And 
of His fullness have all we received, and grace 
for grace." What the law demands, grace sup- 
plies. 

The contrast which John pointed out is ex- 
pounded by Paul: "The law came in, that the 
offence might abound," and the way be prepared 
for the abounding of grace more exceedingly. 

125 



The Two Covenants 

The law points the way, but gives no strength to 
walk in it. The law demands, but makes no 
provision for its demands being met. The law 
burdens and condemns and slays. It can waken 
desire, but not satisfy it. It can rouse to effort, 
but not secure success. It can appeal to motives, 
but gives no inward power beyond what man 
himself has. And so, while warring against sin, 
it became its very ally in giving the sinner over 
to a hopeless condemnation. "The strength of 
sin is the law." 

To deliver us from the bondage and the do- 
minion as sin, grace came by Jesus Christ. Its 
work is twofold. Its exceeding abundance is 
seen in the free and full pardon there is of all 
transgression, in the bestowal of a perfect right- 
eousness, and in the acceptance into God's favor 
and friendship. "In Him we have redemption 
through His blood, the forgiveness of sin accord- 
ing to the riches of His grace." It is not only at 
conversion and our admittance into God's favor, 
but throughout all our life, at each step of our 
way, and amid the highest attainments of the 
most advanced saint; we owe everything to 
grace, and grace alone. The thought of merit 
and work and worthiness is forever excluded. 

The exceeding abundance of grace is equally 

126 



A Covenant of Grace 

seen in the work which the Holy Spirit every 
moment maintains within us. We have found 
that the central blessing of the New Covenant, 
flowing from Christ's redemption and the pardon 
of our sins, is the new heart in which God's law 
and fear and love have been put. It is in the 
fulfillment of this promise, in the maintenance of 
the heart in a state of meetness for God's indwell- 
ing, that the glory of grace is specially seen. In 
the very nature of things this must be so. Paul 
writes: " Where sin abounded, grace did more 
exceedingly abound.'' And where, as far as I 
was concerned, did sin abound ? All the sin in 
earth and hell could not harm me, were it not for 
its presence in my heart. It is there it has exer- 
cised its terrible dominion. And it is there the 
exceeding abundance of grace must be proved, 
if it is to benefit me. All grace in earth and 
heaven could not help me; it is only in the heart 
it can be received, and known, and enjoyed. 
"Where sin abounded," in the heart, there 
"grace did more exceedingly abound; that as 
sin reigned in death," working its destruction in 
the heart and life, "even so might grace reign," 
in the heart too, "through righteousness into 
eternal life, through Jesus Christ our Lord." As 
had been said just before, "They that receive 

127 



The Two Covenants 

the abundance of grace shall reign in life through 
Jesus Christ/' 

Of this reign of grace in the heart Scripture 
speaks wondrous things. Paul speaks of the 
grace that fitted him for his work, of "the gift 
of that grace of God which was given me accord- 
ing to the working of His power." "The grace 
of our Lord was exceeding abundant, with faith 
and love." " The grace which was bestowed 
upon me was not found vain, but / labored more 
abundantly than they all ; yet not I, but the grace 
of God which was with me." "He said unto 
me, My grace is sufficient for thee; My strength 
is made perfect in weakness." He speaks in the 
same way of grace as working in the life of be- 
lievers, when he exhorts them to "be strong in 
the grace that is in Christ Jesus " ; when he tells 
us of "the grace of God" exhibited in the liber- 
ality of the Macedonian Christians, and "the ex- 
ceeding grace of God " in the Corinthians ; when 
he encourages them: "God is able to make all 
grace abound in you, that ye may abound unto 
every good work." Grace is not only the power 
that moves the heart of God in its compassion 
toward us, when He acquits and accepts the 
sinner and makes him a child, but is equally the 
power that moves the heart of the saint, and 

128 



A Covenant of Grace 

provides it each moment with just the disposi- 
tion and the power which it needs to love God 
and do His will. 

It is impossible to speak too strongly of the 
need there is to know that, as wonderful and 
free and alone sufficient as is the grace that par- 
dons, is the grace that sanctifies; we are just as 
absolutely dependent upon the latter as the for- 
mer. We can do as little to the one as the other. 
The grace that works in us must as exclusively 
do all in us and through us as the grace that 
pardons does all for us. In the one case as the 
other, everything is by faith alone. Not to ap- 
prehend this brings a double danger. On the 
one hand, people think that grace cannot be more 
exalted than in the bestowal of pardon on the 
vile and unworthy; and a secret feeling arises 
that, if God be so magnified by our sins more 
than anything else, we must not expect to be 
freed from them in this life. With many this 
cuts at the root of the life of true holiness. On 
the other hand, from not knowing that grace is 
always and alone to do all the work in our sancti- 
fication and fruit-bearing, men are thrown upon 
their own efforts, their life remains one of feeble- 
ness and bondage under the law, and they never 
yield themselves to let grace do all it would. 

129 



The Two Covenants 

Let us listen to what God's Word says: "By 
grace have ye been saved, through faith ; not of 
works, lest any man should glory. For we are 
His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for 
good works, which God afore prepared that we 
should walk in them." Grace stands in contrast 
to good works of our own not only before con- 
version, but after conversion too. We are created 
in Christ Jesus for good works, which God had 
prepared for us. It is grace alone can work them 
in us and work them out through us. Not only 
the commencement but the continuance of the 
Christian life is the work of grace. " Now if it 
is by grace it is no more of works, otherwise 
grace is no more grace; therefore it is of faith 
that it may be according to grace." As we see 
that grace is literally and absolutely to do all in 
us, so that all our actings are the showing forth 
of grace in us, we shall consent to live the life 
of faith — a life in which, every moment, every- 
thing is expected from God. It is only then that 
we shall experience that sin shall not, never, not 
for a moment, have dominion over us. 

"Ye are not under the law, but under grace." 
There are three possible lives. One entirely 
under the law; one entirely under grace; one a 
mixed life, partly law, partly grace. It is this 

130 



A Covenant of Grace 

last against which Paul warns the Romans. It is 
this which is so common, and works such ruin 
among Christians. Let us find out whether this 
is not our position, and the cause of our low 
state. Let us beseech God to open our eyes by 
the Holy Spirit to see that in the New Covenant 
everything, every movement, every moment of 
our Christian life, is of grace, abounding grace; 
grace abounding exceedingly, and working 
mightily. Let us believe that our Covenant God 
waits to cause all grace to abound toward us. 
And let us begin to live the life of faith that de- 
pends upon, and trusts in, and looks to, and ever 
waits for God, through Jesus Christ, by the Holy 
Spirit, to work in us that which is pleasing in 
His sight. 
Grace unto you, and peace be multiplied! 



131 



XV 

THE COVENANT OF AN EVERLASTING PRIESTHOOD 

' ' That My covenant might be with Levi. My 
covenant was with him of life and peace ; and I 
gave them to him for the fear wherewith he feared 
Me, and was afraid before My name. The law 
of truth was in his month , and iniquity was not 
found in his lips ; he walked with Me in peace 
and equity, and did turn many away from in- 
iquity" — Mal. ii. 4-6. 

Israel was meant by God to be a nation of 
priests. In the first making of the Covenant this 
was distinctly stipulated. "If ye will obey My 
voice, and keep My covenant, ye shall be unto 
Me a kingdom of priests." They were to be the 
stewards of the oracles of God; the channels 
through whom God's knowledge and blessing 
were to be communicated to the world; in them 
all nations were to be blessed. 

Within the people of Israel one tribe was 
specially set apart to embody and emphasize the 
priestly idea. The firstborn sons of the whole 
people were to have been the priests. But to 
secure a more complete separation from the rest 

132 



Covenant of an Everlasting Priesthood 

of the people, and the entire giving up of any 
share in their possessions and pursuits, God 
chose one tribe to be exclusively devoted to the 
work of proving what constitutes the spirit and 
the power of priesthood. Just as the priesthood 
of the whole people was part of God's Covenant 
with them, so the special calling of Levi is spoken 
of as God's Covenant of Life and Peace being 
with Him, as the Covenant of an everlasting 
priesthood. All this was to be a picture to help 
them and us, in some measure, to apprehend the 
priesthood of His own Blessed Son, the Mediator 
of the New Covenant. 

Like Israel, all God's people, under the New 
Covenant, are a royal priesthood. The right of 
free and full access to God, the duty and power 
of mediating for our fellow men and being God's 
channel of blessing to them, is the inalienable 
birthright of every believer. Owing to the 
feebleness and incapacity of many of God's chil- 
dren, their ignorance of the mighty grace of the 
New Covenant, they are utterly impotent to take 
up and exercise their priestly functions. To 
make up for this lack of service, to show forth 
the exceeding riches of His grace in the New 
Covenant, and the power He gives men of be- 
coming, just as the priests of old were the fore- 

133 



The Two Covenants 

runners of the Great High Priest, His followers 
and representatives, God still allows and invites 
those of His redeemed ones who are willing, to 
offer their lives to this blessed ministry. To him 
who accepts the call, the New Covenant brings 
in special measure what God has said: "My 
Covenant of Life and Peace shall be with him"; 
it becomes to him in very deed "the Covenant 
of an everlasting priesthood." As the Covenant 
of Levi's priesthood issued and culminated in 
Christ's, ours issues from that again, and receives 
from it its blessing to dispense to the world. 

To those who desire to know the conditions on 
which, as part of the New Covenant, the Cove- 
nant of an everlasting priesthood can be received 
and carried out, a study of the conditions on 
which Levi received the priesthood will be most 
instructive. We are not only told that God chose 
that tribe, but what there specially was in that 
tribe that fitted it for the work. Malachi says : 
" I gave him My covenant for the fear wherewith 
he feared Me, and was afraid before My name." 
The reference is to what took place at Sinai when 
Israel had made the molten calf. Moses called 
all who were on the Lord's side, who were ready 
to avenge the dishonor done to God, to come to 
him. The tribe of Levi did so, and at his bid- 

134 



Covenant of an Everlasting Priesthood 

ding took their swords, and slew three thousand 
of the idolatrous people (Ex. xxxii. 26-29). In 
the blessing with which Moses blessed the tribes 
before his death, their absolute devotion to God, 
without considering relative or friend, is men- 
tioned as the proof of their fitness for God's 
service (Deut. xxxiii. 8-1 1): "Let Thy Thum- 
mim and Thy Urim be with Thy holy one, who 
said unto his father and to his mother, I have not 
known thee; neither did he acknowledge his 
own brethren, nor know his own children: for 
they have observed Thy word and kept Thy 
covenant. ,, 

The same principle is strikingly illustrated in 
the story of Aaron's grandson, Phineas, where 
he, in his zeal for God, executed judgment on 
disobedience to God's command. The words 
are most suggestive. " And the Lord spake unto 
Moses, saying, Phineas, the son of Eleazar, the 
son of Aaron, hath turned away My wrath from 
the children of Israel, in that he was jealous with 
My jealousy among them, so that I consumed 
them not in My jealousy. Wherefore say, Be- 
hold, I give unto him My covenant of peace: and 
it shall be unto him, and his seed after him, the 
covenant of an everlasting priesthood; because 
he was jealous for his God, and made an atone- 

135 



The Two Covenants 

ment for the children of Israel" (Num. xxv. 10- 
13). To be jealous with God's jealousy, to be 
jealous for God's honor, and rise up against sin, 
is the gate into the Covenant of an everlasting 
priesthood, is the secret of being entrusted by 
God with the sacred work of teaching His peo- 
ple, and burning incense before Him, and turning 
many from iniquity (Deut. xxxiii. 10; Mai. ii. 6). 

Even the New Covenant is in danger of being 
abused by the seeking of our own happiness or 
holiness, more than the honor of God or the de- 
liverance of men. Even where these are not en- 
tirely neglected, they do not always take the 
place they are meant to have — that first place that 
makes everything, the dearest and best, second- 
ary and subordinate to the work of helping and 
blessing men. A reckless disregard of every- 
thing that would interfere with God's will and 
commands, a being jealous with God's jealousy 
against sin, a witnessing and a fighting against it 
at any sacrifice — this is the school of training for 
the priestly office. 

It is this the world needs nowadays — men of 
God in whom the fire of God burns, men who 
can stand and speak and act in power on behalf 
of a God who, amid His own people, is dishon- 
ored by the worship of the golden calf. Under- 

136 



Covenant of an Everlasting Priesthood 

stand that as you will, of the place given to 
money and rich men in the church, of the preva- 
lence of worldliness and luxury, or of the more 
subtle danger of a worship meant for the true 
God, under forms taken from the Egyptians, and 
suited to the wisdom and the carnal life of this 
world. A religion God cannot approve is often 
found even where the people still profess to be 
in covenant with God. "Consecrate yourselves 
to-day unto the Lord, even every man upon his 
brother." This call of Moses is as much needed 
to-day as ever. To each one who responds there 
is the reward of the priesthood. 

Let all who would know to the full what the 
New Covenant means, remember God's Covenant 
of Life and Peace with Levi. Accept of the holy 
calling to be an intercessor, and to burn incense 
before the Lord continually. Live, work, pray, 
believe, as one God has sought and found to 
stand in the gap before Him. The New Cove- 
nant was dedicated by a sacrifice and a death: 
reckon it your most wonderful privilege, your 
fullest entrance into its life, as you reflect the 
glory of the Lord, and are changed into the same 
image from glory to glory, as by the Spirit of the 
Lord, to let the Spirit of that sacrifice and death 
be the moving power in all your priestly func- 

137 



The Two Covenants 

tions. Sacrifice yourself, live and die for your 
fellow men. 

One of the great objects with which God has 
made a Covenant with us, is, as we have said so 
often, to waken strong confidence in Himself 
and His faithfulness to His promise. And one of 
the objects that He has in wakening and so 
strengthening the faith in us, is that He may use 
us as His channels of blessing to the world. In 
the work of saving men, He wants intercessory 

! 



prayer to take the first place. He would have us 



come to Him to receive, from Him in heaven, the 
spiritual life and power which can pass out from 
us to them. He knows how difficult and hope- 
less it is in many cases to deal with sinners; He 
knows that it is no light thing for us to believe 
that in answer to our prayer the mighty power 
of God will move to save those around us; He 
knows that it needs strong faith to persevere 
patiently in prayer in cases in which the answer 
is long delayed, and every year appears farther 
off than ever. And so He undertakes, in our 
own experience, to prove what faith in His 
Divine power can do, in bringing down all the 
blessings of the New Covenant on ourselves, that 
we may be able to expect confidently what we 

ask for others. 

138 



Covenant of an Everlasting Priesthood 

In our priestly life there is still another aspect. 
The priests had no inheritance with their breth- 
ren; the Lord God was their inheritance. They 
had access to His dwelling and His presence, 
that there they might intercede for others, and 
thence testify of what God is and wills. Their 
personal privilege and experience fitted them for 
their work. If we would intercede in power, do 
let us live in the full realization of New Covenant 
life. It gives us not only liberty and confidence 
with God, and power to persevere; it gives us 
power with men, as we can testify to and prove 
what God has done to us. Herein is the full 
glory of the New Covenant, that, like Christ, its 
Mediator, we have the fire of the Divine love 
dwelling in us, and consuming us in the service 
of men. May to each of us the chief glory of 
the New Covenant be that it is the Covenant of 
an everlasting priesthood. 



139 



XVI 

THE MINISTRY OF THE NEW COVENANT 

" Ye are our epistle, written in our hearts, 
known and read of all men ; being made manifest 
that ye are an epistle of Christ, ministered by us, 
written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the 
living God : not in tables of stone, but in tables 
that are hearts of flesh. And such confidence 
have we through Christ Godward : not that we 
are sufficient of ourselves, to account anything as 
from ourselves ; but our sufficiency is from God; 
who also made us sufficient as ministers of a new 
covenant ; not of the letter, but of the Spirit ; for 
the letter hilleth, but the Spirit giveth life." — 2 
Cor. iii. 2-6. 

We have seen that the New Covenant is a 
ministration of the Spirit. The Holy Spirit min- 
isters all its grace and blessing in Divine power 
and life. 1 He does this through men, who are 
called ministers of a New Covenant, ministers of 
the Spirit. The Divine ministration of the Cove- 
nant to men, and the earthly ministry of God's 
servants, are equally to be in the power of the 
Holy Spirit. The ministry of the New Cove- 

1 It may be well to read again and compare Chapter VII. : "The New 
Covenant : a Ministration of the Spirit." 

140 



The Ministry of the New Covenant 

nant has its glory and its fruits in this, that it is 
all to be a demonstration of the Spirit and of 
power. 

What a contrast this to the Old Covenant. 
Moses had indeed received of the glory of God 
shining upon him, but had to put a veil on his 
face. Israel was incapable of looking on it. In 
hearing and reading Moses, there was a veil on 
their hearts. From Moses they might receive 
knowledge and thoughts and desires, — the power 
of God's Spirit, to enable them to see the glory 
of what God speaks, was not yet given. This 
is the exceeding glory of the New Covenant, that 
it is a ministration of the Spirit; that its ministers 
have their sufficiency from God, who makes 
them ministers of the Spirit, and makes them 
able so to speak the words of God in the Spirit, 
so that they are written in the heart, and that 
the hearers become legible, living epistles of 
Christ, showing the law written in their heart 
and life. 

The ministry of the Spirit! What a glory 
there is in it! What a responsibility it brings! 
What a sufficiency of grace there is provided 
for it! What a privilege, to be a minister of the 
Spirit! 

What tens of thousands we have throughout 

141 



The Two Covenants 

Christendom who are called ministers of the 
gospel. What an inconceivable influence they 
exert for life or for death over the millions who 
depend upon them for their knowledge and par- 
ticipation of the Christian life. What a power 
there would be if all these were ministers of the 
Spirit! Let us study the word, until we see what 
God meant the ministry to be, and learn to take 
our part in praying and laboring to have it noth- 
ing less. 

God hath made us ministers of the Spirit 
The first thought is that a minister of the New 
Covenant must be a man personally possessed of 
the Holy Spirit. There is a twofold work of the 
Spirit: one in giving a holy disposition and char- 
acter, the other in qualifying and empowering a 
man for work. The former must always come 
first. The promise of Christ to His disciples, 
that they should receive the Holy Spirit for their 
service, was very definitely given to those who 
had followed and loved Him, and kept His com- 
mandments. It is by no means enough that a 
man have been born of the Spirit. If he is to be 
a "sufficient minister" of the New Covenant, he 
must know what it is to be led by the Spirit, to 
walk in the Spirit, and to say, "The law of the 

Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free 

142 



The Ministry of the New Covenant 

from the law of sin and death." Who that 
wants to learn Greek or Hebrew would accept a 
professor who hardly knows the elements of 
these languages ? And how can a man be a 
minister of the New Covenant, which is so en- 
tirely "a ministration of the Spirit," a minis- 
tration of heavenly life and power, unless he 
knows by experience what it is to live in the 
Spirit ? The minister must, before everything, 
be a personal proof and witness of the truth and 
power of God in the fulfillment of what the New 
Covenant promises. Ministers are to be picked 
men; the best specimens and examples of what 
the Holy Spirit can do to sanctify a man, and by 
the working of God's power in him to fit him for 
His service. 

God hath made us ministers of the Spirit. 
Next to this thought, of being personally pos- 
sessed by the Spirit, comes the truth that all their 
work in the ministry can be done in the power 
of the Spirit. What an unspeakably precious 
assurance — Christ sends them to do a heavenly 
work, to do His work, to be the instruments in 
His hands, by which He works: He clothes them 
with a heavenly power. Their calling is "to 
preach the gospel with the Holy Ghost sent 
down from heaven." As far as feelings are con- 

143 



The Two Covenants 

cerned, they may have to say as Paul: "I was 
with you in weakness, and in fear, and in much 
trembling/' That does not prevent their adding, 
nay rather, that may just be the secret of their 
being able to add: " My preaching was in dem- 
onstration of the Spirit and of power." If a man 
is to be a minister of the New Covenant, a mes- 
senger and a teacher of its true blessing, so as to 
lead God's children to live in it, nothing less will 
do than a full experience of its power in himself, 
as the Spirit ministers it. Whether in his feeding 
on God's word himself, or his seeking in it for 
God's message for his people, whether in secret 
or intercessory prayer, whether in private inter- 
course with souls or public teaching, he is to 
wait upon, to receive, to yield to the energizing 
of the Holy Spirit, as the mighty power of God 
working with him. This is his sufficiency for 
the work. He may every day afresh claim and 
receive the anointing with fresh oil, the new 
inbreathing from Christ of His own Spirit and 
life. 

God hath made us ministers of the Spirit. 
There is something still, of no less importance. 
The minister of the Spirit must especially see to 
it that he lead men to the Holy Spirit. Many 

will say, If he be led of the Spirit in teaching 

144 



The Ministry of the New Covenant 

men, is not that enough ? By no means. Men 
may become too dependent on him; men may 
take his Scripture teaching at second-hand, and, 
while there is power and blessing in his ministry, 
have reason to wonder that the results are not 
more definitely spiritual and permanent. The 
reason is simple. The New Covenant is: they 
shall no longer every man teach his brother, 
know the Lord, for all shall know Me, from the 
least even to the greatest. The Father wants 
every child, from the least, to live in continual 
personal intercourse with Himself. This cannot 
be, except as he is taught and helped to know 
and wait on the Holy Spirit. Bible study and 
prayer, faith and love and obedience, the whole 
daily walk must be taught as entirely dependent 
on the teaching and working of the indwelling 
Spirit. 

The minister of the Spirit, very definitely and 
perseveringly, points away from himself to the 
Spirit. This is what John the Baptist did. He 
was filled with the Holy Spirit from his birth, but 
sent men away from himself to Christ, to be by 
Him baptized with the Spirit. Christ did the 
same. In His farewell discourse He called His 
disciples to turn from His personal instruction to 
the inward teaching of the Holy Spirit, who 

145 



The Two Covenants 

should dwell in them, and guide them into the 
truth and power of all He had taught them. 

There is nothing so needed in the Church to- 
day. All its feebleness and formalities and 
worldliness, the lack of holiness, of personal 
devotion to Christ, of enthusiasm for His cause 
and kingdom, is owing to one thing — the Holy 
Spirit is not known and honored and yielded to, 
as the one only, as the one all-sufficient source of 
a holy life. The New Covenant is not known as 
a ministration of the Spirit in the heart of every 
believer. The one thing needful for the Church 
is — the Holy Spirit in His power dwelling and 
ruling in the lives of God's saints. And as one 
of the chief means to this there are needed min- 
isters of the Spirit, themselves living in the en- 
joyment and power of this great gift, who per- 
sistently labor to bring their brethren into the 
possession of their birthright: the Holy Spirit in 
the heart, maintaining, in Divine power, an un- 
ceasing communion with the Son and with the 
Father. The ministration of the Spirit makes the 
ministry of the Spirit possible and effectual. And 
the ministry of the Spirit again makes the minis- 
tration of the Spirit an actual experimental reality 
in the life of the Church. 

We know how dependent the Church is on its 

146 



The Ministry of the New Covenant 

ministry. The converse is no less true. The 
ministers are dependent on the Church. They 
are its children; they breathe its atmosphere; 
they share its health or sickliness; they are de- 
pendent upon its fellowship and intercession. 
Let none of us think that all that the New Cove- 
nant calls us to is to see that we personally accept 
and rejoice in its blessings. No, indeed; God 
wants every one who enters into it to know that 
its privileges are for all His children, and to give 
himself to make this known. And there is no 
more effectual way of doing this than taking 
thought for the ministry of the Church. Com- 
pare the ministry around you with its pattern in 
God's word (see specially i Cor. ii.; 2 Cor. iii.). 
Join with others who know how the New Cove- 
nant is nothing, if it be not a ministration of the 
Spirit, and cry to God for a spiritual ministry. 
Ask the leading of God the Holy Ghost to teach 
you what can be done, what you can do, to have 
the ministry of your Church become a truly 
spiritual one. Human condemnation will do as 
little good as human approbation. It is as the 
supreme place of the Holy Spirit, as the repre- 
sentative and revealer of the Father and the Son, 
is made clear to us, that the one desire of our 
heart, and our continual prayer, will be, that 

147 



The Two Covenants 

God would so discover to all the ministers of His 
word their heavenly calling, that they may, above 
everything, seek this one thing, — to be sufficient 
ministers of the New Covenant, not of the letter, 
but of the Spirit. 



148 



XVII 

HIS HOLY COVENANT 

11 To remember His Holy Covenant, to grant 
unto us that we, being delivered out of the hands 
of our enemies, should serve Him without fear, in 
holiness and righteousness before Him, all our 
days" — Luke i. 68-75. 

When Zacharias was filled with the Holy Spirit 
and prophesied, he spoke of God's visiting and 
redeeming His people, as a remembering of His 
Holy Covenant. He speaks of what the bless- 
ings of that Covenant would be, not in words 
that had been used before, but in what is mani- 
festly a Divine revelation to him by the Holy 
Spirit ; and gathers up all the former promises in 
these words: "That we should serve Him with- 
out fear, in holiness and righteousness before Him 
all the days of our life." Holiness in life and 
service is to be the great gift of the Covenant of 
God's Holiness. As we have seen before, the 
Old Covenant proclaimed and demanded holiness; 
the New provides it; holiness of heart and life is 
its great gift. 

There is no attribute of God so difficult to 

149 



The Two Covenants 

define, so peculiarly a matter of Divine revela- 
tion, so mysterious, incomprehensible, and in- 
conceivably glorious, as His Holiness. It is that 
by which He is specially worshipped in His 
majesty on the throne of heaven (Isa. vi. 2; Rev. 
iv. 8, xv. 4). It unites His righteousness, that 
judges and condemns, with His love, that saves 
and blesses. As the Holy One He is a consum- 
ing fire (Isa. x. 17); as the Holy One He loves to 
dwell among His people (Isa. xii. 6). As the 
Holy One He is at an infinite distance from us ; 
as the Holy One He comes inconceivably near, 
and makes us one with, makes us like Himself. 
The one purpose of His holy Covenant is to make 
us holy as He is holy. 

As the Holy One He says: " I am holy; be ye 
holy; I am the Lord which hallow you, which 
make you holy." The highest conceivable sum- 
mit of blessedness is our being partakers of the 
Divine nature, of the Divine holiness. 

This is the great blessing Christ, the Mediator 
of the New Covenant, brings. He has been 
made unto us "both righteousness and sanctifi- 
cation " — righteousness in order to, as a prepara- 
tion for, sanctification * or holiness. He prayed 



1 Remember that the words sanctify, sanctity, saint are the same as make 
holy, holiness, holy one. 

150 



His Holy Covenant 

to the Father: " Sanctify them ; for their sakes I 
sanctify Myself, that they themselves may also be 
sanctified in truth." In Him we are sanctified, 
saints, holy ones (Rom. i. 7; 1 Cor. i. 2). We 
have put on the new man which after God is 
created in righteousness and holiness. Holiness 
is our very nature. 

We are holy in Christ. As we believe it, as we 
receive it, as we yield ourselves to the truth, and 
draw nigh to God to have the holiness drawn 
forth and revealed in fellowship with Him, its 
fountain, we shall know how divinely true it is. 

It is for this the Holy Spirit has been given in 
our hearts. He is the " Spirit of Holiness." His 
every working is in the power of holiness. Paul 
says: "God hath chosen us unto salvation, in 
sanctifi cation of the Spirit and belief of the 
truth." As simple and entire as is our depend- 
ence on the word of truth, as the external means, 
must our confidence be in the hidden power for 
holiness which the working of the Spirit brings. 
The connection between God's electing purpose, 
and the work of the Spirit, with the word we 
obey, comes out with equal clearness in Peter: 
"Elect, in sanctification of the Spirit, unto obedi- 
ence." The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the life of 
Christ; as we know, and honor, and trust Him, 

151 



The Two Covenants 

we shall learn and also experience that, in the 
New Covenant, as the ministration of the Spirit, 
the sanctification, the holiness of the Holy Spirit 
is our covenant right. We shall be assured that, 
as God has promised, so He will work it in us, 
that we " should serve Him without fear, in 
righteousness and holiness before Him, all the 
days of our life." With a treasure of holiness in 
Christ, and the very Spirit of holiness in our 
hearts, we can live holy lives. That is if we be- 
lieve Him "who worketh in us both to will and 
to work." 

In the light of this Covenant promise, with the 
Blessed Son and the Holy Spirit to work it out in 
us, what new meaning is given to the teaching 
of the New Testament. Take the first epistle St. 
Paul ever wrote. It was directed to men who 
had only a few months previously been turned 
from idols to serve the Living God, and to wait 
for His Son from heaven. The words he speaks 
in regard to the holiness they might aim at and 
expect, because God was going to work it in 
them, are so grand that many Christians pass 
them by, as practically unintelligible (i Thess. iii. 
13): "The Lord make you to increase and 
abound in love, to the end He may stablish your 
hearts unblamable in holiness at the coming of 

152 



His Holy Covenant 

our Lord Jesus with all His saints." That 
promises holiness, unblamable holiness, a heart 
unblamable in holiness, a heart stablished in all 
this by God Himself. Paul might indeed say of 
a word like this: "Who hath believed our re- 
port ?" He had written of himself (ii. 10): " Ye 
know how holily and righteously and unblamably 
we behaved ourselves." He assures them that 
what God has done for him He will do for them 
— give them hearts unblamable in holiness. The 
Church believes so little in the mighty power 
of God, and the truth of His Holy Covenant, that 
the grace of such heart-holiness is hardly spoken 
of. The verse is often quoted in connection 
with "the coming of our Lord Jesus with His 
saints "; but its real point and glory, — that when 
He comes we may meet Him with hearts stab- 
lished unblamable in holiness by God Himself. 
All too little this is proclaimed or expected. 

Or take another verse in the Epistle (v. 21), 
also spoken to these young converts from heath- 
enism, in reference to the coming of our Lord. 
Some think that to speak much of the coming of 
the Lord will make us holy. Alas ! how little it 
has done so in many cases. It is the New Cove- 
nant Holiness, wrought by God Himself in us, 
believed in and waited for from Him, that can 

153 



The Two Covenants 

make our waiting differ from the carnal expecta- 
tions of the Jews or the disciples. Listen — ' ' The 
God of Peace Himself " — that is the keynote of 
the New Covenant — what you never can do God 
will work in you — " Sanctify you wholly" ; this 
you may ask and expect — " and may your spirit 
and soul and body be preserved entire, unblam- 
able, at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ." 
And now, as if to meet the doubt that will arise: 
" Faithful is He that callethyou, who will also 
do it." Again, it is the secret of the New Cove- 
nant — what hath not entered into the heart of 
man — God will work in them that wait for Him. 
Until the Church awakes to see and believe that 
our holiness is to be the immediate almighty 
working of the Three-One God in us, and that 
our whole religion must be an unceasing de- 
pendence to receive it direct from Himself, these 
promises remain a sealed book. 

Let us now return to the prophecy of the Holy 
Spirit by Zacharias, of God's remembering the 
Covenant of His Holiness, to make us holy, to 
stablish our hearts unblamable in holiness, that 
we should serve Him in holiness and righteous- 
ness. Note how every word is significant. 

To grant us. It is to be a gift from above. 
The promise given with the Covenant was: " I 

154 



His Holy Covenant 

the Lord have spoken it; I will perform it." We 
need to beseech God to show us what He will 
do; when our faith expects all from Him, the 
blessing will be found. 

" That we, being delivered out of the hands of 
our enemies" He had just before said: He hath 
raised up an horn of salvation for us ; salvation 
from our enemies and the hand of all that hate 
us. It is only a free people can serve a Holy 
God, or be holy. It is only as the teaching of 
Rom. vi.-viii. is experienced, and I know what it 
is that we are " freed from sin," and " freed from 
the law," and that "the Spirit of life in Christ 
Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and 
death," that in the perfect liberty from every 
power that could hinder, I can expect God to do 
His mighty work in me. 

Should serve Him. My servant does not serve 
me by spending all his time in getting himself 
ready for work, but in doing my work. The 
Holy Covenant sets us free, and endows us with 
Divine grace, that God may have us for His 
work, — the same work Christ began, and we 
now carry on. 

Without fear. In childlike confidence and 
boldness before God. And before men too. A 
freedom from fear in every difficulty, because 

155 



The Two Covenants 

having learned to know that God works all in us 
we can trust Him to work all for us and through 
us. 

Before Him. With His continued unceasing 
presence all the day as the unceasing security of 
our obedience and our fearlessness, the never- 
failing secret of our being sanctified wholly. 

All our days. Not only all the day for one 
day, but for every day, because Jesus is a High 
Priest in the power of an endless life, and the 
mighty operation of God as promised in the 
Covenant is as unchanging as is God Himself. 

Is it not as if you begin to see that God's word 
does appear to mean more than you have ever 
conceived of or expected ? It is well that it 
should be so. It is only when you begin to say, 
Glory to Him who is able to do exceeding abun- 
dantly above all we can ask or think, and expect 
God's almighty, supernatural, altogether immeas- 
urable power and grace to work out the New 
Covenant life in you, and to make you holy, that 
you will really come to the place of helplessness 
and dependence where God can work. 

I pray you, my Brother, do believe that God's 
word is true, and say with Zacharias, " Blessed 
be the Lord, the God of Israel, who hath visited 
His people, to remember His Holy Covenant, 

156 



His Holy Covenant 

and to grant us, that we, being delivered from 
the hand of our enemies, should serve Him with- 
out fear, in holiness and righteousness before 
Him, all our days.' 1 



157 



XVIII 

ENTERING THE COVENANT: WITH ALL THE HEART 

" And they entered into the covenant to seek the' 
Lord God of their fathers with all their heart, 
and all their soul," — 2 Chron. xv. 12 (see xxiv. 
31, and 2 Kings xxiii. 3). 

" The Lord thy God will circumcise thine 
heart, to love the Lord thy God with all thine 
heart, and with all thy soul." — Deut. xxx. 6. 

11 And I will give them an heart to know Me, 
that I am the Lord ; and they shall be My people, 
and I will be their God : for they shall turn to 
Me with their whole heart." — Jer. xxiv. 7 (see 
xxix. 13). 

"/ will make an everlasting covenant with 
them, that I will not turn away from them, to do 
them good ; but I will put My fear in their hearts, 
that they shall not depart from Me. Yea, I will 
rejoice over them to do them good, with My whole 
heart and My whole soul." — Jer. xxxii. 40. 

In the days of Asa, Hezekiah, and Josiah, we 
read of Israel entering into "the Covenant " with 
their whole heart, "to perform the words of the 
Covenant which are written in the book. ,, Of 
Asa's day, we read: "They sware unto the 

158 



Entering the Covenant 



*& 



Lord; and all Judah rejoiced at the oath, for they 
had sworn with their whole heart, and sought 
Him with their whole desire ; and He was found 
of them." Wholeheartedness is the secret of 
entering the Covenant, and God being found of 
us in it. Wholeheartedness is the secret of joy 
in religion — a full entrance into all the blessed- 
ness the Covenant brings. God rejoices over His 
people to do them good, with His whole heart 
and His whole soul: it needs, on our part, our 
whole heart and our whole soul to enter into and 
enjoy this joy of God in doing us good with His 
whole heart and His whole soul. With what 
measure we mete, it shall be measured unto us 
again. 

If we have at all understood the teaching of 
God's word in regard to the New Covenant, we 
know what it reveals in regard to the two parties 
who meet in it. On God's side there is the 
promise to do for us and in us all that we need 
to serve and enjoy Him. He will rejoice in do- 
ing us good, with His whole heart. He will be 
our God, doing for us all that a God can do, giv- 
ing Himself as God to be wholly ours. And on 
our side there is the prospect held out of our be- 
ing able, in the power of what He engages to 
do, to "turn to Him with our whole heart," "to 

159 



The Two Covenants 

love Him with all our heart and all our strength. " 
The first and great commandment, the only pos- 
sible terms on which God can fully reveal Him- 
self, or give Himself to His creature to enjoy, is, 
"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy 
heart." That law is unchangeable. The New 
Covenant comes and brings us the grace to obey, 
by lifting us into the love of God as the air we 
breathe, and calls upon us, in the faith of that 
grace, to rise and be of good courage, and with 
our whole heart to yield ourselves to the God of 
the Covenant, and the life in His service. 

Wholeheartedness in the love and the service 
of God ! how shall I speak of it ? Of its impera- 
tive necessity ? It is the one unalterable condi- 
tion of true communion with God, of which 
nothing can supply the want. Of its infinite 
reasonableness ? With such a God, a very 
Fountain of all that is loving and lovely, of all 
that is good and blessed, the All-glorious God : 
surely there cannot for a moment be a thought of 
anything else being His due, or of our consent- 
ing to offer Him anything less, than the love of 
the whole heart. Of its unspeakable blessed- 
ness ? To love Him with the whole heart, this is 
the only possible way of receiving His great love 
into our heart and rejoicing in it — yielding one- 

160 



Entering the Covenant 

self to that great love, and allowing God Him- 
self, just as an earthly love enters into us and 
makes us glad, to give us the taste and the joy 
of the heavenliness of that love. Of its terrible 
lack ? Yes, what shall I speak of this ? Where 
find words to open the eyes and reach the heart, 
and show how almost universal is the lack of 
true wholeheartedness in the faith and love of 
God, in the seeking to love Him with the whole 
heart, in the giving up everything to possess 
Him, to please Him, to be wholly possessed of 
Him ? And then of the blessed certainty of its 
attainableness ? The Covenant has provided for 
it. The Triune God will work it by taking pos- 
session of the heart, and dwelling there. The 
Blessed Mediator of the Covenant undertakes for 
all we have to do. His constraining love shed 
abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit can bring 
it and maintain it. Yes, I ask how shall I speak 
of all this ? 

Have we not spoken enough of it already in 
this book? Do we not need something more 
than words and thoughts ? Is not what we need 
rather this— quietly to turn to the Holy Spirit 
who dwells in us, and in the faith of the light 
and the strength our Lord gives through Him, 
accept and act out what God tells us of the God- 

161 



The Two Covenants 

given heart He has placed within us, the God- 
wrought wholeheartedness He works ? Surely 
the new heart which has been given us to love 
God with, with God's Spirit in it, is wholly for 
God. Let our faith accept and rejoice in the 
wondrous gift, and not fear to say : I will love 
Thee, O Lord, with my whole heart. Just think 
for a moment of what it means that God has 
given us such a heart. 

We know what God's giving means. His giv- 
ing depends on our taking. He does not force 
upon us spiritual possessions. He promises, and 
gives, in such measure as desire and faith are 
ready to receive. He gives in Divine power ; as 
faith trusts and yields itself to that power, the 
gift becomes consciously and experimentally our 
possession. 

As spiritual gifts God's bestowings are not 
recognised by sense or reason. "Ear hath not 
heard, neither have entered into the heart of 
man, the things which God hath prepared for 
them that love Him. But God hath revealed 
them unto us by His Spirit. We have received 
the Spirit which is of God, that we might know 
the things which are freely given us of God." It 
is as you yield yourself to be led and taught 
by the Spirit, that your faith will be able, despite 

162 



Entering the Covenant 

of all lack of feeling, to rejoice in the possession 
of the new heart, and all that is given with it. 

Then, this Divine giving is continuous, I be- 
stow a gift on a man; he takes it, and I never see 
him again. So God bestows temporal gifts on 
men, and they never think of Him. But spiritual 
gifts are only to be received and enjoyed in un- 
ceasing communication with God Himself. The 
new heart is not a power I have in myself, like 
the natural endowments of thinking or loving. 
No, it is only in unceasing dependence upon, in 
close contact with, God, that the heavenly gift of 
a new heart can be maintained uninjured, can 
day by day become stronger. It is only in God's 
immediate presence, in unceasing direct de- 
pendence on Him, that spiritual endowments are 
preserved. 

Then, further, spiritual gifts can only be en- 
joyed by acting them out in faith. None of the 
graces of the Christian life, like love, or meek- 
ness, or boldness, can be felt or known, much 
less strengthened, until we begin to exercise 
them. We must not wait to feel them, or to 
feel the strength for them ; we must, in the 
obedience of the faith that they are given us, and 
hidden within us, practice them. Whatever we 
read of the new heart, and of all God has given 

163 



The Two Covenants 

into it in the New Covenant, must be boldly be- 
lieved and carried out into action. 

All this is especially true of wholeheartedness, 
and loving God with all our heart. You may at 
first be very ignorant of all it implies. God has 
planted the new heart in the midst of the flesh, 
which, with its animating principle, Self, has to 
be denied, to be kept crucified, and by the Holy 
Spirit to be mortified. God has placed you in 
the midst of a world, from which, with all that 
is of it and its spirit, you are to come out and be 
entirely separate. God has given you your work 
in His kingdom, for which He asks all your in- 
terest, and time, and strength. In all these three 
respects you need wholeheartedness, to enable 
you to make the sacrifices that may be required. 
If you take the ordinary standard of Christian life 
around you, you will find that wholeheartedness, 
intense devotion to God and His service, is hardly 
thought of. How to make the best of both 
worlds, innocently to enjoy as much as possible 
of this present life, is the ruling principle, and, as 
a natural consequence, the present world secures 
the larger share of interest. To please self is 
considered legitimate, and the Christlike life of 
not pleasing self has little place. Wholehearted- 
ness will lead you, and enable you too, to ac- 

164 



Entering the Covenant 

cept Christ's command and sell all for the pearl 
of great price. Though at first afraid of what it 
may involve, do not hesitate to speak the word 
frequently in the ear of your Father: with my 
whole heart. You may count on the Holy Spirit 
to open up its meaning, to show you to what 
service or what sacrifice God calls you in it, to 
increase its power, to reveal its blessedness, to 
make it the very spirit of your life of devotion to 
your Covenant God. 

And now, who is ready to enter into this New 
and Everlasting Covenant with his whole heart ? 
Let each of us do it. 

Begin by asking God very humbly to give you 
by the Spirit, who dwells in you, the vision of 
the heavenly life, of wholehearted love and obe- 
dience as it has actually been prepared for you 
in Christ. It is an existing reality, a spiritual en- 
dowment out of the life of God which can come 
upon you. It is secured to you in the Covenant, 
and in Christ Jesus, its Surety. Ask earnestly, 
definitely, believingly, that God reveal this to 
you. Rest not till you know fully what your 
Father means you to be, and has provided for 
your most certainly being. 

When you begin to see why the New Cove- 
nant was given, and what it promises, and how 

165 



The Two Covenants 

divinely certain its promises are, offer yourself to 
God unreservedly to be taken up into it. Offer, 
if He will take you in, to love Him with your 
whole heart, and to obey Him with all your 
strength. Hold not back, be not afraid. God 
has sworn to do you good with His whole heart: 
do say, do not hesitate to say, that into this 
Covenant, in which He promises to cause you to 
turn to Him, and to love Him with your whole 
heart, you now enter with your whole heart. If 
there be any fear, just ask again and believingly 
for a vision of the Covenant life. God swearing 
to do you good with His whole heart; God under- 
taking to make and enable you to love and obey 
Him with your whole heart: the vision of this life 
will make you bold to say: Into this Covenant of 
a wholehearted love in God and in me I do with 
my whole heart now enter. 

Let us close and part with this one thought. 
A redeeming God, rejoicing with His whole heart 
and whole soul to do us good, and to work in us 
all that is well-pleasing in His sight: this is the 
one side. Such is the God of the Covenant. 
Gaze upon Him. Believe Him. Worship Him. 
Wait upon Him, until the fire begin to burn, and 
your heart be drawn out with all its might to 
love this God. Then the other side. A re- 

166 



Entering the Covenant 

deemed soul, rejoicing with all its heart and all 
its soul in the love of this God, entering into the 
covenant of wholehearted love, and venturing, 
ere it knows, to say to Him: With my whole 
heart I do love Thee, God, my exceeding joy. 
Such are the children of the Covenant. 

Beloved reader! rest not till you have entered 
in, through the Gate Beautiful, through Christ 
the door, into this temple of the love, of the 
heart, of God. 



167 



NOTES 

NOTE A 

THE SECOND BLESSING 

In the life of the believer there sometimes 
comes a crisis, as clearly marked as his conver- 
sion, in which he passes out of a life of continual 
feebleness and failure to one of strength, and 
victory, and abiding rest. The transition has 
been called the Second Blessing. Many have ob- 
jected to the phrase, as being unscriptural, or as 
tending to make a rule for all, what was only a 
mode of experience in some. Others have used 
it as helping to express clearly in human words 
what ought to be taught to believers as a possible 
deliverance from the ordinary life of the Chris- 
tian, to one of abiding fellowship with God, and 
entire devotion to His service. In introducing it 
into the title of this book, I have indicated my 
belief that, rightly understood, the words ex- 
press a scriptural truth, and may be a help to be- 
lievers in putting clearly before them what they 
may expect from God. Let me try and make 
clear how I think we ought to understand it. 

I have connected the expression with the two 

168 



Notes 

Covenants. Why was it that God made two 
Covenants — not one, and not three? Because 
there were two parties concerned. In the First 
Covenant man was to prove what he could do, 
and what he was. In the Second, God would 
show what He would do. The former was the 
time of needed preparation; the latter, the time 
of Divine fulfillment. The same necessity as 
there was for this in the race, exists in the indi- 
vidual too. Conversion makes of a sinner a 
child of God, full of ignorance and weakness, 
without any conception of what the whole- 
hearted devotion is that God asks of him, or the 
full possession God is ready to take of him. In 
some cases the transition from the elementary 
stage is by a gradual growth and enlightenment. 
But experience teaches, that in the great ma- 
jority of cases this healthy growth is not found. 
To those who have never found the secret of a 
healthy growth, of victory over sin and perfect 
rest in God, and have possibly despaired of ever 
finding it, because all their efforts have been fail- 
ures, it has often been a wonderful help to learn 
that it is possible by a single decisive step, bring- 
ing them into a right relationship to Christ, His 
Spirit, and His strength, to enter upon an entirely 
new life. 

169 



The Two Covenants 

What is needed to help a man to take that step 
is very simple. He must see and confess the 
wrongness, the sin, of the life he is living, not in 
harmony with God's will. He must see and be- 
lieve in the life which Scripture holds out, which 
Christ Jesus promises to work and maintain in 
him. As he sees that his failure has been owing 
to his striving in his own strength, and believes 
that our Lord Jesus will actually work all in him 
in Divine power, he takes courage, and dares 
surrender himself to Christ anew. Confessing 
and giving up all that is of self and sin, yielding 
himself wholly to Christ and His service, he be- 
lieves and receives a new power to live his life 
by the faith of the Son of God. The change is 
in many cases as clear, as marked, as wonderful, 
as conversion. For lack of a better name, that 
of A Second Blessing came most naturally. 

When once it is seen how greatly this change 
is needed in the life of most Christians, and how 
entirely it rests on faith in Christ and His power, 
as revealed in the Word, all doubt as to its 
scripturalness will be removed. And when once 
its truth is seen, we shall be surprised to find 
how, throughout Scripture, in history and teach- 
ing, we find what illustrates and confirms it. 

Take the twofold passage of Israel through 

170 



Notes 

water, first out of Egypt, then into Canaan. 
The wilderness journey was the result of unbe- 
lief and disobedience, allowed by God to humble 
them, and prove them, and show what was in 
their heart. When this purpose had been ac- 
complished, a second blessing led them through 
Jordan, as mightily into Canaan, as the first had 
brought them through the Red Sea out of Egypt 

Or take the Holy Place and the Holiest of All, 
as types of the life in the two covenants, and 
equally in the two stages of Christian experience. 
In the former, very real access to God and fellow- 
ship with Him, but always with a veil between. 
In the latter, the full access into the immediate 
presence of God, and the full experience of the 
power of the heavenly life. As the eyes are 
opened to see how terribly the average Christian 
life comes short of God's purpose, and how truly 
the mingled life can be expelled by the power of 
a new revelation of what God waits to do, the 
types of Scripture will shine with a new mean- 
ing. 

A look to the teachings of the New Testament. 
In Romans, Paul contrasts the life of the Chris- 
tian under the law with that under grace, the 
spirit of bondage with the Spirit of adoption. 
What does this mean but that Christians may 

171 



The Two Covenants 

still live under the law and its bondage, that they 
need to come out of this into the full life of grace 
and liberty through the Holy Spirit, and that, 
when first they see the difference, nothing is 
needed but the surrender of faith, to accept and 
experience what grace will do by the Holy Spirit. 

To the Corinthians, Paul writes of some being 
carnal, and still babes, walking as men after the 
flesh; others being spiritual, with spiritual dis- 
cernment and character; to the Galatians, he 
speaks of the liberty with which Christ, by the 
Spirit, makes free from the law, in contrast to 
those who sought to perfect in the flesh, what 
was begun in the Spirit, and who gloried in the 
flesh; — all to call them to recognize the danger of 
the carnal, divided life, and to come at once to 
the life of faith, the life in the Spirit, which alone 
is according to God's will. 

Everywhere we see in Scripture, what the 
state of the Church at the present day confesses, 
that conversion is only the gate that leads into 
the path of life, that within that gate there is 
still great danger of mistaking the path, of turn- 
ing aside, or turning back, and that where this 
has taken place we are called at once, and with 
our whole heart, to turn and give ourselves to 
nothing less than all that Christ is willing to 

172 



Notes 

work in us. Just as there are many who have 
always thought that conversion must be slow, 
and gradual, and uncertain, because they only 
take man's powers into account, and cannot 
understand how it can be sudden and final, so 
many cannot see how the revelation of the true 
life of holiness, and the entrance on it by faith 
out of a life of self-effort and failure, may be 
immediate and permanent. They look too much 
to man's efforts, and know not how the second 
blessing is nothing more nor less than a new 
vision of what Christ is willing to work in us, 
and the surrender of faith that yields all to Him. 

I would fain hope that what I have written in 
this book may help some to see that the second 
blessing is just what they need, is what God by 
His Spirit will work in them, is nothing but the 
acceptance of Christ in all His saving power as 
our strength and life, and is what will bring 
them into, and fit them for, that full life in the 
New Covenant, in which God works all in all. 

Let me close this note with a quotation from 

the introduction to a little book just published, 

Dying to Self: A Golden Dialogue, by William 

Law, with notes by A. M. : "A great deal has 

been said against the use of the terms, the 

Higher Life, the Second Blessing. In Law one 

173 



The Two Covenants 

finds nothing of such language, but of the deep 
truth of which they are the, perhaps defective, 
expression, this book is full. The points on 
which so much stress is laid in what is called 
Keswick teaching, stand prominently out in his 
whole argument. The low state of the average 
life of believers, the cause of all failure as coming 
from self-confidence, the need of an entire sur- 
render of the whole being to the operation of 
God, the call to turn to Christ as the One and 
Sure Deliverer from the power of self, the Divine 
certainty of a better life for all who will in self- 
despair trust Christ for it, and the heavenly joy of 
a life in which the Spirit of Love fills the heart — 
these truths are common to both. What makes 
Law's putting of the truth of special value of the 
way in which he shows how humility and utter 
self-despair, with the resignation to God's mighty 
working in simple faith, is the infallible way to 
be delivered from self, and have the Spirit of 
Love fill the heart." 



NOTE B.— Chap. IV 

THE LAW WRITTEN IN THE HEART 

The thought of the law written in the heart 
sometimes causes difficulty and discouragement, 

174 



Notes 

because believers do not see or feel in themselves 
anything corresponding to it. An illustration 
may help to remove the difficulty. There are 
fluids by which you can write so that nothing is 
visible, either at once or later, unless the writing 
be exposed to the sun or the action of some 
chemical. The writing is there, but one who is 
ignorant of the process cannot think it is there, 
and knows not how to make it readable. The 
faith of a man who is in the secret knows it is 
there though he see it not. 

It is even thus with the new heart. God has 
put His law into it. " Blessed are the people in 
whose heart is God's law." But it is there in- 
visibly. He that takes God's promise in faith, 
knows that it is in his own heart. As long as 
there is not clear faith on this point, all attempts 
to find it, or to fulfill that law, will be vain. But 
when by a simple faith the promise is held fast, 
the first step is taken to realize it. The soul is 
then prepared to receive instruction as to what 
the writing of the law in the heart means. It 
means, first, that God has implanted in the new 
heart a love of God's law, and a readiness to do 
all His will. You may not feel this disposition 
there, but it is there. God has put it there. Be- 
lieve this, and be assured that there is in you a 

175 



The Two Covenants 

Divine nature that says — and you therefore do 
not hesitate to say it — " I delight to do Thy will, 
O God ! " In the name of God, and in faith, say 
it. 

This writing of the law means, further, that in 
planting this principle in you, God has taken all 
that you know of God's will already, and in- 
spired that new heart with the readiness to obey 
it. It may as yet be written there with invisible 
writing, and you are not conscious of it. That 
does not matter. You have here to deal with a 
Divine and hidden work of the Holy Spirit. Be 
not afraid to say : Oh, how love I Thy law ! God 
has put the love of it into your heart, the new 
heart. He has taken away the stony heart; it is 
by the new heart you have to live. 

The next thing implied in this writing of the 
law, is that you have accepted all God's will, 
even what you do not yet know, as the delight 
of your heart. In giving yourself up to God, 
you gave yourself wholly to His will. That was 
the one condition of your entering the Covenant; 
Covenant grace will now provide for teaching 
you to know, and strengthening you to do, all 
your Father would have you do. 

The whole life in the New Covenant is a life 

of faith. Faith accepts every promise of the 

176 



Notes 

Covenant, is certain that it is being fulfilled, looks 
confidently to the God of the Covenant to do His 
work. Faith believes implicitly in the new heart, 
with the law written in it, because it believes in 
the promise, and in the God who gave and ful- 
fills the promise. 

It may be well to add here that the same truth 
holds good of all the promises concerning the 
new heart — they must be accepted and acted on 
by faith. When we read of "the love of God 
shed abroad in the heart by the Holy Spirit," of 
"Christ dwelling in the heart," of "a clean heart," 
of "loving each other with a clean heart fer- 
vently," of "God establishing our heart unblam- 
able in holiness," we must, with the eye of faith, 
regard these spiritual realities as actually and in 
very deed existing within us. In His hidden un- 
seen way God is working them there. Not by 
sight or feeling, but by faith in the Living God 
and His Word, we know they are as inspiration 
for the dispositions and inclinations of the new 
heart. In this faith we are to act, knowing that 
we have the power to love, to obey, to be holy. 
The New Covenant gives us a God who works 
all in us; faith in Him gives us the assurance, 
above and beyond all feeling, that this God is 

doing His blessed work. 

177 



The Two Covenants 

And if the question be asked what we are to 
think of all there is within us that contradicts 
this faith, let us remember what Scripture teaches 
us of it. We sometimes speak of an old and a 
new heart. Scripture does not do so. It speaks 
of the old, the stony, heart, being taken away — 
the heart, with its will, disposition, affections, 
being made new with a Divine newness. This 
new heart is placed in the midst of what Scrip- 
ture calls the flesh, in which there dwelleth no 
good thing. We shall find it a great advantage 
to adhere as closely as possible to Scripture lan- 
guage. It will greatly help our faith even to use 
the very words God by His Holy Spirit had used 
to teach us. And it will greatly clear our view 
for knowing what to think of the sin that re- 
mains in us if we think of it and deal with it in 
the light of God's truth. Every evil desire and 
affection comes from the flesh, man's sinful nat- 
ural life. It owes its power greatly to our igno- 
rance of its nature, and our trusting to its help 
and strength to cast out its evil. I have already 
pointed out how sinful flesh and religious flesh 
is one, and how all failure in religion is owing to 
a secret trust in ourselves. As we accept and 
make use of what God says of the flesh, we shall 
see in it the source of all evil in us; we shall say 

178 



Notes 

of its temptations: " It is no more I, but sin that 
dwelleth in me"; we shall maintain our integrity 
as we maintain a good conscience that condemns 
us for nothing knowingly done against God's 
will; and we shall be strong in the faith of the 
Holy Spirit, who dwells in the new heart, so to 
strengthen that we need not and " shall not ful- 
fill the lusts of the flesh." 

I conclude with an extract of an address by 
Rev. F. Webster, at Keswick last year, in con- 
firmation of what I have just said : "Put ye on 
the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision 
for the flesh, to fulfill the lusts thereof. ' Make 
no provision for the flesh.' The flesh is there, 
you know. To deny or ignore the existence of 
an enemy is to give him a great chance against 
you; and the flesh is in the believer to the very 
end, a force of evil to be reckoned with continu- 
ally, an evil force inside a man, and yet, thank 
God, a force which can be so dealt with by the 
power of God, that it shall have no power to de- 
file the heart or deflect the will. The flesh is in 
you, but your heart may be kept clean moment 
by moment in spite of the existence of evil in 
your fallen nature. Every avenue, every open- 
ing that leads into the heart, every thought and 
desire and purpose and imagination of your be- 

179 



The Two Covenants 

ing, may be closed against the flesh, so that there 
shall be no opening to come in and defile the 
heart or deflect the will from the will of God. 

" You say that is a very high standard, but it 
is the Word of God. There is to be no secret 
sympathy with sin. Although the flesh is there, 
you are to make it no excuse for sins. You are 
not to say, I am naturally irritable, anxious, jeal- 
ous, and I cannot help letting these things crop 
up; they come from within. Yes, they come 
from within, but then there need be no provi- 
sion, no opening, in your heart for these things 
to enter. Your heart can be barricaded with an 
impassable barrier against these things. 'No 
provision for the flesh/ Not merely the front 
door barred and bolted so that you do not invite 
them to come in, but the side and back door 
closed too. You may be so Christ-possessed and 
Christ-enclosed that you shall positively hate 
everything that is of the flesh. 

" * Make no provision for the flesh.' The only 
way to do so is to ' put on the Lord Jesus Christ.' 
I spoke of the heart being so barricaded that 
there should be no entrance to it, that the flesh 
should never be able to defile it or deflect the 
will from the will of God. How can that be 
done ? By putting on the Lord Jesus Christ. It 

180 



Notes 

has been such a blessing to me just to learn that 
one secret, just to learn the positive side of de- 
liverance — putting on the Lord Jesus Christ." 



NOTE C— Chap. VII 

GEORGE MULLER AND HIS SECOND CONVERSION 

In the life of George Muller of Bristol there 
was an epoch, four years after his conversion, to 
which he ever after looked back, and of which 
he often spoke, as his entrance into the true 
Christian life. 

In an address given to ministers and workers 
after his ninetieth birthday, he spoke thus of it 
himself: "That leads to another thought — the 
full surrender of the heart to God. I was con- 
verted in November, 1825, but I only came into 
the full surrender of the heart four years later, 
in July, 1829. The love of money was gone, the 
love of place was gone, the love of position was 
gone, the love of worldly pleasures and engage- 
ments was gone. God, God, God alone became 
my portion. I found myall in Him; I wanted 
nothing else. And by the grace of God this has 
remained, and has made me a happy man, an ex- 
ceedingly happy man, and it led me to care only 

1S1 



The Two Covenants 

about the things of God. I ask, affectionately, 
my beloved brethren, have you fully surrendered 
the heart to God, or is there this thing or that 
thing with which you are taken up irrespective of 
God ? I read a little of the Scriptures before, but 
preferred other books, but since that time the 
revelation He has made of Himself has become 
unspeakably blessed to me, and I can say from 
my heart, God is an infinitely lovely Being. Oh! 
be not satisfied until in your inmost soul you can 
say, God is an infinitely lovely Being! " 

The account he gives of this change in his jour- 
nal is as follows. He speaks of one whom he 
had heard preach at Teignmouth, where he had 
gone for the sake of his health. "Though I did 
not like all he said, yet I saw a gravity and 
solemnity in him different from the rest. Through 
the instrumentality of this brother the Lord be- 
stowed a great blessing upon me, for which I 
shall have cause to thank Him throughout eternity. 
God then began to show me that the Word of 
God alone is to be our standard of judgment in 
spiritual things; that it can only be explained by 
the Holy Spirit, and that in our day, as well as in 
former times, He is the Teacher of His people. 
The office of the Holy Spirit I had not experi- 
mentally understood before that time. I had not 

182 



Notes 

before seen that the Holy Spirit alone can teach 
us about our state by nature, show us our need 
of a Saviour, enable us to believe in Christ, ex- 
plain to us the Scriptures, help us in preaching, 
etc. 

" It was my beginning to understand this point 
in particular which had a great effect on me ; for 
the Lord enabled me to put it to the test of ex- 
perience by laying aside commentaries and al- 
most every other book, and simply reading the 
Word of God and studying it. The result of this 
was that the first evening that I shut myself into 
my room to give myself to prayer and meditation 
over the Scriptures, I learned more in a few hours 
than I had done during a period of several 
months previously. But the particular difference 
was that I received real strength in my soul in 
doing so. 

" In addition to this, it pleased the Lord to lead 
me to see a higher standard of devotedness than 
I had seen before. He led me, in a measure, to 
see what is my glory in this world, even to be 
despised, to be poor and mean with Christ. . 
. . I returned to London much better in body. 
And so to my soul, the change was so great that 
it was like a second conversion." 

In another passage he speaks thus: "I fell 

183 



The Two Covenants 

into the snare into which so many young be- 
lievers fall, the reading of religious books is pre- 
ferred to the Scriptures. Now the Scriptural 
way of reasoning would have been : God Him- 
self has condescended to become an author, and 
I am ignorant of that precious Book which His 
Holy Spirit has caused to be written ; therefore I 
ought to read again this Book of books most ear- 
nestly, most prayerfully, and with much medita- 
tion. Instead of acting thus, and being led by 
my ignorance of the Word to study it more, my 
difficulty of understanding it made me careless of 
reading it, and then, like many believers, I prac- 
tically preferred for the first four years of my 
Christian life, the works of uninspired men to 
the oracles of the Living God. The consequence 
was that I remained a babe, both in knowledge 
and grace. In knowledge, I say, for all true 
knowledge must be derived by the Spirit from 
the Word. This lack of knowledge most sadly 
kept me back from walking steadily in the ways 
of God. For it is the truth makes us free, by 
delivering us from the slavery of the lusts of the 
flesh, the lusts of the eyes, and the pride of life. 
The Word proves it, the experience of the saints 
proves it, and also my own experience most de- 
cidedly proves it. For when it pleased the Lord, 

184 



Notes 

in August, 1829, to bring me really to the Scrip- 
tures, my life and walk became very different. 

"If any one would ask me how he may read 
the Scriptures most profitably, I would answer 
him : 

"I. Above all he must seek to have it settled 
in his own mind that God alone, by the Holy 
Spirit, can teach him, and that, therefore, as God 
will be inquired for all blessings, it becomes him 
to seek for God's blessing previous to reading, 
and also while reading. 

11 2. He should also have it settled in his mind 
that though the Holy Spirit is the best and suffi- 
cient Teacher, yet that He does not always teach 
immediately when we desire it, and that, there- 
fore, we may have to entreat Him again and 
again for the explanation of certain passages ; 
but that He will surely teach us at last, if we 
will seek for light prayerfully, patiently, and for 
the glory of God." 

Just one more passage, from an address given 
on his ninetieth birthday : " For sixty-nine 
years and ten months he had been a very happy 
man. That he attributed to two things. He 
had maintained a good conscience, not willfully 
going on in a course he knew to be contrary to 
the mind of God ; he did not, of course, mean 

185 



The Two Covenants 

that he was perfect ; he was poor, weak, and 
sinful. Secondly, he attributed it to his love of 
Holy Scripture. Of late years his practice had 
been four times every year to read through the 
Scriptures, with application to his own heart, 
and with meditation ; and that day he was a 
greater lover of God's Word than he was sixty- 
six years ago. It was this, and maintaining a 
good conscience, that had given him all these 
years peace and joy in the Holy Ghost. " 

In connection with what has been said about 
the New Covenant being a ministration of the 
Spirit this narrative is most instructing. It shows 
us how George Muller's power lay in God's re- 
vealing to him the work of the Holy Spirit. He 
writes that up to the time of that change he had 
"not experimentally understood the office of the 
Holy Spirit." We speak much of George Miil- 
ler's power in prayer; it is of importance to re- 
member that that power was entirely owing to 
his love of, and faith in, God's Word. But it is 
of still more importance to notice that his power 
to believe God's Word so fully was entirely 
owing to his having learned to know the Holy 
Spirit as his Teacher. When the words of God 
are explained to us, and made living within us by 
the Holy Spirit, they have a power to awaken 

186 



Notes 

faith which they otherwise have not. The Word 
then brings us into contact with God, comes to 
us as from God direct, and binds our whole life 
to Him. 

When the Holy Spirit thus feeds us on the 
Word, our whole life comes under His power, 
and the fruit is seen, not only in the power of 
prayer, but as much in the power of obedience. 
Notice how Mr. Muller tells us this, that the two 
secrets of his great happiness were, his great love 
for God's Word, and his ever maintaining a good 
conscience, not knowingly doing anything against 
the will of God. In giving himself to the teach- 
ing of the Holy Spirit, as he tells us in his birth- 
day address, he made a full surrender of the en- 
tire heart to God, to be ruled by the Word. He 
gave himself to obey that Word in everything, 
he believed that the Holy Spirit gave the grace to 
obey, and so he was able to maintain a walk free 
from knowingly transgressing God's law. This 
is a point he always insisted on. So he writes, 
in regard to a life of dependence upon God: "It 
will not do — it is not possible — to live in sin y and 
at the same time, by communion with God, to 
draw down from heaven everything one needs 
for the life that now is." Again, speaking of the 
strengthening of faith: " It is of the utmost im- 

187 



The Two Covenants 

portance that we seek to maintain an upright 
heart and a good conscience, and therefore do not 
knowingly and habitually indulge in those things 
which are contrary to the mind of God. All my 
confidence in God, all my leaning upon Him in 
the hour of trial, will be gone if I have a guilty 
conscience, and do not seek to put away this 
guilty conscience, but still continue to do things 
which are contrary to His mind." 

A careful perusal of this testimony will show 
us how the chief points usually insisted upon in 
connection with the second blessing are all found 
here. There is the full surrender of the heart to 
be taught and led alone by the Spirit of God. 
There is the higher standard of holiness which is 
at once set up. There is the tender desire in 
nothing to offend God, but to have at all times a 
good conscience, that testifies that we are pleas- 
ing to God. And there is the faith that where 
the Holy Spirit reveals to us in the Word the will 
of God, He gives the sufficient strength for the 
doing of it. " The particular difference," he says 
of reading with faith of the Holy Spirit's teach- 
ing, " was that I received real strength in my soul 
in doing so." 

All centres in this, that we believe in the New 
Covenant and its promises as a ministration of 

188 



Notes 

the Spirit. That belief may come to some sud- 
denly, as to George Muller; or it may dawn upon 
others by degrees. Let all say to God that they 
are ready to put their whole heart and life under 
the rule of the Holy Spirit dwelling in them, 
teaching them by the Word, and strengthening 
them by His grace. He enables us to live pleas- 
ing to God. 



NOTE D.— Chap. X 

CANON BATTERSBY 

I do not know that I can find a better case by 
which to illustrate the place Christ, the Mediator 
of the Covenant, takes in leading into its full 
blessing than that of the founder of the Keswick 
Convention, the late Canon Battersby. 

It was at the Oxford Convention in 1873 that 
he witnessed to having " received a new and dis- 
tinct blessing to which he had been a stranger be- 
fore." For more than twenty-five years he had 
been most diligent as a minister of the gospel, 
and, as appears from his journals, most faithful 
in seeking to maintain a close walk with God. 
But he was ever disturbed by the consciousness 
of being overcome by sin. So far back as 1853 

189 



The Two Covenants 

he had written, "I feel again how very far I am 
from enjoying habitually that peace and love and 
joy which Christ promises. I must confess that 
I have it not; and that very ungentle and un- 
christian tempers often strive within me for the 
mastery. " When in 1873 he read what was be- 
ing published of the Higher Life, the effect was 
to render him utterly dissatisfied with himself 
and his state. There were indeed difficulties he 
could not quite understand in that teaching, but 
he felt that he must either reach forward to bet- 
ter things, nothing less than redemption from all 
iniquities, or fall back more and more into world- 
liness and sin. At Oxford he heard an address 
on the rest of faith. It opened his eyes to the 
truth that a believer who really longs for deliver- 
ance from sinning must simply take Christ at His 
word, and reckon, without feeling, on Him to do 
His work of cleansing and keeping the soul. " I 
thought of the sufficiency of Jesus, and said, I 
will rest in Him, and I did rest in Him. I was 
afraid lest it should be a passing emotion; but I 
found that a presence of Jesus was graciously 
manifested to me in a way I knew not before, 
and that / did abide in Him. 1 do not want to 
rest in these emotions, but just to believe, and to 
cling to Christ as my all" He was a man of 

190 



Notes 

very reserved nature, but felt it a duty ere the 
close of the Conference to confess publicly his 
past shortcoming, and testify openly to his hav- 
ing entered upon a new and definite experience. 

In a paper written not long after this he pointed 
out what the steps are leading to this experience. 
First, a clear view of the possibilities of Christian 
attainment — a life in word and action, habitually 
governed by the Spirit, in constant communion 
with God, and continual victory over sin through 
abiding in Christ. Then, the deliberate purpose 
of the will for a full renunciation of all the idols 
of the flesh or spirit, and a will-surrender to 
Christ. And then this last and important step: 
We must look up to, and wait upon our ascended 
Lord for all that we need to enable us to do this. 

A careful perusal of this very brief statement 
will prove how everything centred here in Christ. 
The surrender for a life of continual communion 
and victory is to be to Christ. The strength for 
that life is to be in Him and from Him, by faith 
in Him. And the power to make the full sur- 
render and rest in Him was to be waited for from 
Him alone. 

In June, 1875, the first Keswick Convention was 
held. In the circular calling it, we read: "Many 
are everywhere thirsting that they may be brought 

191 



The Two Covenants 

to enjoy more of the Divine presence in their 
daily life, and a fuller manifestation of the Holy 
Spirit's power, whether in subduing the lusts of 
the flesh, or in enabling them to offer more effec- 
tive service to God. It is certainly God's will 
that His children should be satisfied in regard to 
these longings, and there are those who can 
testify that He has satisfied them, and does satisfy 
them with daily fresh manifestations of His grace 
and power." The results of the very first Con- 
vention were most blessed, so that after its close 
he wrote: " There is a very remarkable resem- 
blance in the testimonies I have since received as 
to the nature of the blessing obtained, viz, the 
ability given to make a full surrender to the Lord, 
and the consequent experience of an abiding 
peace, far exceeding anything previously experi- 
enced." Through all the chief thought, was 
Christ, first drawing and enabling the soul to rest 
in Him, and then meeting it with the fulfillment 
of its desire, the abiding experience of His 
power to keep it in victory over sin, and com- 
munion with God. 

And what was the fruit of this new experi- 
ence ? Eight years later Canon Battersby spoke: 
"It is now eight years since that I knew this 
blessing as my own. I cannot say that I have 

192 



Notes 

never for a moment ceased to trust the Lord to 
keep me. But I can say that so long as I have 
trusted Him, He has kept me; He has been 
faithful." 



NOTE E.— Chap. VII 

NOTHING OF MYSELF 

One would think that no words could make it 
plainer than the words of the Covenant state it — 
that the one difference between Old and New is, 
that in the latter everything is to be done by God 
Himself. And yet believers and even teachers do 
not take it in. And even those who do, find it 
hard to ^ive it out. Our whole being is so blinded 
to the true relation to God, His inconceivable 
Omnipresent Omnipotence working every mo- 
ment in us is so far beyond the reach of human 
conception, our little hearts cannot rise to the 
reality of His Infinite Love making itself one with 
us, and delighting to dwell in us, and to work all 
in us that has to be done there — that, when we 
think we have accepted the truth, we find it is 
only a thought. We are such strangers to the 
knowledge of what a God really is, as the actual 
life by which His creatures live. In Him we live 

193 



The Two Covenants 

and move and have our being. And specially is 
the knowledge of the Triune God too high for 
us, in that wonderful, most real, and most prac- 
tical indwelling, to make which possible the Son 
became Incarnate, and the Holy Spirit was sent 
forth into our hearts. Only they who confess 
their ignorance, and wait very humbly and per- 
sistently on our Blessed God to teach us by His 
Holy Spirit what that all-working indwelling is, 
can hope to have it revealed to them. 

It is not long since I had occasion, in preparing 
a series of Bible Lessons for our Students Asso- 
ciation here, to make a study of the Gospel of St. 
John, and of the life of our Lord as set forth 
there. I cannot say how deeply I have been 
afresh impressed with that which I cannot but 
regard as the deepest secret of His life on earth, 
His dependence on the Father. It has come to me 
like a new revelation. Some twelve times and 
more He uses the word not and nothing of Him- 
self. Not My will. Not My words. Not My 
honor. Not Mine own glory. I can do nothing 
of Myself. I speak not of Myself. I came not 
of Myself. I do nothing of Myself. 

Just think a moment what this means in con- 
nection with what He tells us of His life in the 
Father. " As the Father hath life in Himself, so 

194 



Notes 

He hath given to the Son to have life in Himself" 
(v. 26). "That all men should honor the Son, 
even as they honor the Father" (v. 2}). And yet 
this Son, who hath life in Himself even as the 
Father has, immediately adds (v. 30): "I can of 
Mine own self do nothing." We should have 
thought that with this life in Himself He would 
have the power of independent action as the 
Father has. But no. "The Son can do nothing 
of Himself, but what He seeth the Father do." 
The chief mark of this Divine life He has in 
Himself is evidently unceasing dependence, re- 
ceiving from the Father, by the moment, what 
He had to speak or do. Nothing of Myself is 
manifestly as true of Him as it ever could be of 
the weakest or most sinful man. The life of the 
Father dwelling in Christ, and Christ in the 
Father, meant that just as truly as when He was 
begotten of the Father, He received Divine life 
and glory from Him, so the continuation of that 
life came only by an eternal process of giving 
and receiving, as absolute as is the eternal gener- 
ation itself. The more closely we study this 
truth and Christ's life in the light of it, the more 
we are compelled to say, the deepest root of 
Christ's relationship to the Father, the true reason 
why He was so well-pleasing, the secret of His 

195 



The Two Covenants 

glorifying the Father, was this : He allowed God 
to do all in Him. He only received and wrought 
out what God wrought in Him. His whole atti- 
tude was that of the open ear, the servant spirit, 
the childlike dependence that waited for all on 
God. 

The infinite importance of this truth in the 
Christian life is easily felt. The life Christ lived 
in the Father is the life He imparts to us. We 
are to abide in Him and He in us, even as He in 
the Father and the Father in Him. And if the 
secret of His abiding in the Father be this unceas- 
ing self-abnegation — "I can do nothing of My- 
self" — this life of most entire and absolute de- 
pendence and waiting upon God, must it not far 
more be the most marked feature of our Chris- 
tian life, the first and all-pervading disposition we 
seek to maintain? In a little book of William 
Law's, that has just been issued, 1 he specially in- 
sists upon this in his so striking repetition of the 
call, if we would die to self in order to have the 
birth of Divine love in our souls, to sink down in 
humility, meekness, patience, and resignation to 
God. I think that no one who at all enters into 
this advice, but will feel what new point is given 

1 Dying to self: A Golden Dialogue. By William Law. With Notes. 
The thought is worked out with exceeding power, and the lesson taught 
that the only thing man can do for his salvation is to deny and cease from 
himself, that God may work in him. 

196 



Notes 

to it by the remembrance of how this entire self- 
renunciation was not only one of the many vir- 
tues in the character of Christ, but, indeed, that 
first essential one without which God could have 
wrought nothing in Him, through which God 
did work all. 

Let us make Christ's words our own: "/ can 
do nothing of Myself " Take it as the keynote 
of a single day. Look up and see the Infinite 
God waiting to do everything as soon as we are 
ready to give up all to Him, and receive all from 
Him. Bow down in lowly worship, and wait 
for the Holy Spirit to work some measure of the 
mind of Christ in you. Do not be disconcerted 
if you do not learn the lesson at once: there is 
the God of love waiting to do everything in him 
who is willing to be nothing. At moments the 
teaching appears dangerous, at other times ter- 
ribly difficult. The Blessed Son of God teaches 
it us — this was His whole life: I can do nothing 
of Myself. He is our life; He will work it in us. 
And when as the Lamb of God He begets this 
His disposition in us, we shall be prepared for 
Him to rise on us and shine in us in His heavenly 
glory. 

"Nothing of Myself " — that word spoken 
eighteen hundred years ago, coming out of the 

197 



The Two Covenants 

inmost depths of the heart of the Son of God — is 
a seed in which the power of the eternal life is 
hidden. Take it straight from the heart of Christ, 
and hide it in your heart. Meditate on it till it 
reveals the beauty of His Divine meekness and 
humility, and explains how all the power and 
glory of God could work in Him. Believe in it 
as containing the very life and disposition which 
you need, and believe in Christ, whose Spirit 
dwells in the seed to make it true in you. Begin, 
in single acts of self-emptying, to offer it to God 
as the one desire of your heart. Count upon 
God accepting them, and meeting them with His 
grace, to make the acts into habits, and the habits 
into dispositions. And you may depend upon 
it, there is nothing that will lift you so near to 
God, nothing that will unite you closer to Christ, 
nothing that will prepare you for the abiding 
presence and power of God working in you, as 
the death to self which is found in the simple 
word — Nothing of myself. 

This word is one of the keys to the New Cove- 
nant Life. As I believe that God is actually to 
work all in me, I shall see that the one thing that 
is hindering me is, my doing something of my- 
self. As I am willing to learn from Christ by the 
Holy Spirit to say truly, Nothing of myself, I shall 

198 



Notes 

have the true preparation to receive all God has 
engaged to work, and the power confidently to 
expect it. I shall learn that the whole secret of 
the New Covenant is just one thing: God works 
all! The seal of the Covenant stands sure: "I 
the Lord have spoken it, and I will do it." 



NOTE R— Chap. XVIII 

THE WHOLE HEART 

Let me give the principal passages in which 
the words "the whole heart," "all the heart," are 
used. A careful study of them will show how 
wholehearted love and service is what God has 
always asked, because He can, in the very na- 
ture of things, ask nothing less. The prayerful 
and believing acceptance of the words will waken 
the assurance that such wholehearted love and 
service is exactly the blessing the New Covenant 
was meant to make possible. That assurance 
will prepare us for turning to the Omnipotence 
of God to work in us what may have hitherto 
appeared beyond our reach. 
Hear, first, God's word in Deuteronomy — 
iv. 29: "If thou seek the Lord thy God, thou 
shalt find Him, if thou seek Him with all thy 
heart and all thy soul." 

199 



The Two Covenants 

vi. 4, 5: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is 
one Lord; and thou shalt love the Lord thy God 
with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and 
with all thy might." 

x. 12: "What doth the Lord thy God require 
of thee but to fear the Lord thy God, to walk in 
all His ways, and to love Him, and to serve Him 
with all thy heart and all thy soul." 

xi. 13: "Hearken diligently unto My com- 
mandments, to love the Lord your God, and to 
serve Him with all your heart and all your soul." 

xiii. 3: "The Lord your God proveth you, 
whether ye love the Lord your God with all your 
heart and all your soul." 

xxvi. 16: "Thou shalt therefore keep these 
statutes and do them with all thy heart and all 
thy soul." 

xxx. 2: "Thou shalt obey His voice with all 
thine heart and with all thy soul." 

xxx. 6: "The Lord thy God will circumcise 
thine heart, to love the Lord thy God with all 
thine heart and with all thy soul" (see also v. 9, 
10). 

Take these oft-repeated works as the expres- 
sion of God's will concerning His people, and 
concerning yourself; ask if you could wish to 

give God anything less. Take the last-cited 

200 



Notes 

verse as the Divine promise of the New Cov- 
enant — that He will circumcise, will so cleanse 
the heart to love Him with a wholehearted love, 
that obedience is within your reach; and say 
whether you will not vow afresh to keep this 
His first and great commandment. 

Listen to Joshua (xxii. 5) : " Take diligent heed 
to love the Lord your God, and to walk in all His 
ways, and to keep His commandments, and to 
cleave unto Him, and to serve Him, with all your 
heart and with all your soul." 

Listen to Samuel (1 Sam. xii. 20, 24): "Turn 
not aside from following the Lord, but serve the 
Lord with all your heart. Only fear the Lord, 
and serve Him in truth with all your heart." 

Hear David repeating God's promise to Solo- 
mon (1 Kings ii. 4): "If thy children take heed 
to their way, to walk before Me in truth with all 
their heart and all their soul." 

Hear God's word concerning David (1 Kings 
xiv. 8): "My servant David, who followed Me 
with all his heart, to do that only which was 
right in Mine eyes." 

Hear Solomon in his temple prayer (1 Kings 

viii. 48): "If they return to Thee with all their 

heart and all their soul, hear Thou their prayer." 

Listen to what is said of Jehu (2 Kings x. 31) : 
201 



The Two Covenants 

" The Lord said unto Jehu, Thou hast done well 
in executing that which is right in Mine eyes. 
But Jehu took no heed to walk in the law of the 
Lord with all his heart." 

Of Josiah we read (2 Kings xxiii. 3, 25) : " The 
king and all the men of Judah made a covenant 
with the Lord, to walk after the Lord, with all 
their heart and with all their soul, to perform the 
words of this covenant that were written in this 
book. There was no king like him, that turned 
to the Lord with all his heart, and all his soul, 
and all his might." 

The words concerning Asa, in 2 Chron. xv. 12, 
15, we had as our text. 

Of Jehoshaphat, men said (2 Chron. xxii. 9) : 
" He sought the Lord with all his heart." 

And of Hezekiah it is written (2 Chron. xxxi. 
21): "In every work that he began, to seek his 
God, he did it with all his heart and prospered." 

Oh that all would ask God to give them, by 
the Holy Spirit, a simple vision of Himself! — 
claiming, giving, accepting, blessing, delighting 
in, the love and service of the whole heart — the 
sacrifice of the whole burnt-offering. Surely 
they would fall down and join the ranks of those 
who have given it; and refuse to think of any- 
thing as religious life, or worship, or service, but 

202 



Notes 

that in which their whole heart went out to 
God. 

Turn to the Psalms. Hear David (ix. i, cxi. i, 
cxxxviii. i ) : "I will praise Thee with my whole 
heart." And in Psalm cxix., the Psalm of the 
way of blessedness: "Blessed who seek Him 
with the whole heart. With my whole heart 
have I sought Thee. I shall keep Thy law, yea I 
shall observe it with my whole heart. I en- 
treated Thy favor with my whole heart. I will 
keep Thy precepts with my whole heart. I cried 
with my whole heart." Praise and prayer; seek- 
ing God and keeping His precepts; all equally 
with the whole heart. 

Shall we not begin asking more earnestly than 
ever, as often as we see men engaged in their 
earthly pursuits in search of money, or pleasure, 
or fame, or power, with their whole heart, Is this 
the spirit in which Christians consider that God 
must be served ? Is this the spirit in which I 
serve Him ? Is not this the one thing needful in 
our religion ? Lord, reveal unto us Thy will ! 

Now, just a few words more from the Proph- 
ets about the new time, the great change that can 
come into our lives. 

Jer. xxiv. 7: "/ will give them an heart to 
know Me that I am the Lord; and they shall be 

203 



The Two Covenants 

My people and I will be their God; for they shall 
return to Me with their whole heart." 

xxix. 13: "Ye shall seek Me, and find Me, 
when ye shall search for Me with all your 
heart. And I will be found of you, saith the 
Lord." 

xxxii. 39-41. — Let my reader not be weary of 
reading carefully these Divine words : they con- 
tain the secret, the seed, the living power of a 
complete transition out of a life in the bondage 
of half-hearted service, to the glorious liberty of 
the children of God. — "I will give them one hearty 
that they may fear Me forever. And I will make 
an everlasting covenant with them, that I will not 
turn away from them to do them good ; but / 
will put My fear in their heart, that they shall 
not depart from Me. Yea, I will rejoice over 
them to do them good, with My whole heart and 
My whole soul!" 

It is to be all God's doing. And He is to do it 
with His whole heart and His whole soul. It is 
the vision of this God with His whole heart lov- 
ing us, longing and delighting to fulfill His 
promise, and make us wholly His own, that we 
need. This vision makes it impossible not to love 
Him with our whole heart Lord, open our eyes 

that we may see ! 

2d4 



Notes 

Joel ii. 12: "Therefore also now, saith the 
Lord, turn ye even to Me with all your heart." 

Zeph. iii. 14: "Shout, O Israel; be glad and 
rejoice with all the heart; the Lord hath taken 
away thy judgments. He hath cast out thine 
enemy; the King of Israel, the Lord, is in the 
midst of thee; thou shalt not see evil any 

MORE." 

Now one word from our Lord Jesus (Matt, 
xxii. 37): "Jesus said, Thou shalt love the Lord 
thy God with all thy heart." This is the first and 
great commandment. This is the sum of that law 
He came to fulfill for us and in us, came to enable 
us to fulfill. "For what the law could not do, in 
that it was weak through the flesh, God, send- 
ing His own Son, condemned sin in the flesh, 
that the righteousness of the law might be ful- 
filled in us who walk after the Spirit." 

Praise God! this righteousness of the law — 
loving God with all the heart, for love is the ful- 
filling of the law— this righteousness of the law 
is fulfilled in us, who walk after the Spirit. 
Jesus came to make it possible. He gives His 
Spirit — the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus — to make 
it actual. Let us not fear to give ourselves a 
whole burnt-offering, acceptable to God; loving 
Him with all our heart and mind and strength. 

205 



The Two Covenants 

May I ask the reader just once again to peruse 
Chapter VI., on "The Everlasting Covenant," 
and Chapter XVIII., on "Entering into the Cove- 
nant with the Whole Heart." And say then, if 
you have never yet entered fully into this cove- 
nant of the whole heart, whether you are not 
ready to do it now. God demands, God works, 
God is, oh, so infinitely worthy, of the whole 
heart! Fear not to say He shall have it. You 
may confidently count upon the blessed Lord 
Jesus, the Surety of the Covenant, whose it is to 
make it true in you by His Spirit, to enable you 
to exercise the faith that knows that God's power 
will work what He has promised. In His Name 
say: With my whole heart I do love Thee! 



206 



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